I have been using the at sign (@) to tag words in plain text files. This works great when searching from the shell with grep or ack. But it doesn’t seem to work within DEVONThink. For instance, if I search for the term @essay, text files with the word essay are included in the results along with those with the keyword @essay. How can I avoid this?
DEVONthink ignores nonalphanumeric characters, such as @, #, ;, etc.
You might try another approach, such as the nonsense text string zzz as the cue string.
Too bad, I have thousands of files with such tag, which works fine in the command shell and Spotlight. Is there any low level setting I can change?
No, you cannot alter DEVONthink’s search characteristics.
But if your database(s) provide indexing to Spotlight, you can identify items in your DEVONthink database(s) whether open or closed. Perform the Spotlight search, then choose the option to view all results. A Finder window will open. Items in DEVONthink will be identified by the blue Ammonite shell icon.
Select an item in the search result list. Press the Space bar to see a Quick Look view of it. Double-click the item to open it within DEVONthink.