Search & Colon Commands

Cmd+O opens the search bar from anywhere in the app. Typed plainly, it’s a fuzzy search over every note title (and alias) in your vault. Prefixed with a colon, that same bar runs colon commands — for doing things, not just finding them.

Colon commands

Each command has a short, one-letter form too.

Command	Short	What it does
tag:	t:	Filter to notes with certain tags — combine with and / or, e.g. tag: gym or strong and smart
settings:	s:	Jump straight to one setting by name, e.g. settings: back links
keyboard:	k:	Search every shortcut, slash command, and markdown syntax in the app
vault:	v:	Switch, create, or delete a vault by typing its name
grep:	g:	Search inside the content of every note, not just titles
sort:	so:	Browse notes by folder, note type, or any custom property
batch:	b:	Select several notes, then move or delete them all at once

A few plain phrases jump straight to a full-pane view instead of searching notes: graph view, task view, calendar view / daily calendar, and home / home screen.

Once these feel natural, the search bar mostly replaces digging through menus — Cmd+O plus one letter is almost always faster than reaching for the mouse.

How search results are ranked

This is the part that makes the search bar feel like it’s reading your mind, so it’s worth explaining properly — including the parts that are easy to miss.

Every note’s title gets scored against what you’ve typed, and results are sorted by that score. The scoring has four tiers, each one strictly outranking the next:

1. Exact match ranks highest, always. Typing “standup” puts a note titled exactly “standup” above one titled “standup notes”, every time.
2. Starts with what you typed ranks next.
3. Contains what you typed anywhere else — and among these, a match earlier in the title outranks one further in.
4. Fuzzy match — every letter you typed still has to appear in that order somewhere in the title, but not necessarily next to each other. Typing standup can still find “stand-up update” — the letters line up in order even though a hyphen sits in the middle. Among fuzzy matches, the tighter and more consecutive the matched letters are, the higher it ranks — a match with its letters bunched close together beats one with the same letters scattered across a much longer title.

A single query typically pulls results from more than one tier at once, and the tiers never mix — every exact match outranks every starts-with match, no matter how the fuzzy ones compare to each other:

Matching by alias, and the double-match bonus

Aliases (see Organizing Notes) are searched too, using the same tiers minus the fuzzy step — an alias has to contain what you typed as a literal substring, not just the same letters in order.

Here’s the part worth knowing: if a note matches both by title and by alias, its score doesn’t just take the better of the two — it gets a large bonus on top, guaranteeing it outranks a plain alias-only or title-only match. A note titled “Team Sync Notes” with the alias “sync” will jump to the very top of a search for sync, because it matches both ways at once — it can even outrank a different note whose title is a plain exact match for “sync”, since a double match always beats a single one. Alias results are also checked slightly after title results, so it’s normal to see the list resettle for a moment right after you stop typing.

What doesn’t affect ranking

A few things you might expect to matter, don’t:

• Pinning only changes anything when the search bar is completely empty — that view shows just your pinned notes, most-recently-pinned first. The moment you type a single character, pin status stops mattering; a pinned note is scored exactly like any other.
• How recently or how often you’ve opened a note never factors in. That’s a separate system that only drives the sidebar’s own sort setting — it has no effect here.
• Tags don’t affect a plain search at all. Typing text only ever checks a note’s title and aliases; tags only come into play through the tag: command below.

How each command orders its results

Not every colon command ranks its results the way plain search does — some have their own logic, and a couple don’t rank at all.

Command	Result order
tag:	Filtered correctly, but not ranked — matches appear in whatever order they happen to sit on disk, not alphabetically
grep:	Filtered correctly, but not ranked by relevance — a note with five matches isn’t ranked above one with a single match. Matches inside a note are ordered by where they occur, earliest first
sort:	Has its own real order — by daily-note date, creation date, or the property you’re browsing by. Add search text after the sort target, though (e.g. sort:folder Work groceries), and it quietly drops that order and switches to normal name/alias ranking instead
settings: / keyboard:	The same tiers as plain search, minus the fuzzy step, so an unrelated setting can’t sneak in just because its letters happen to appear in order
vault:	The full ranking used for plain note search, fuzzy matching included
batch:	An unranked list until you start typing a name — after that, it’s the normal scored search