Find Your Information

One of the biggest reasons to store your stuff in DEVONthink (as opposed to, say, the Finder) is its fast, smart, and flexible searching. This chapter describes the search options, from simple to complex, including a look at how to Use Smart Groups. It also discusses how to Search Using the Concordance, a specialized way of searching based on the frequency with which words appear in your database.

Perform a Simple Search

Most searches in DEVONthink are simple and straightforward—and the process couldn’t be easier. Type your search term into the search field on the toolbar, and DEVONthink almost instantly returns matching documents from anywhere in the current database—with default settings, you need not even press Return (Figure 48).

Results are ranked by relevance, and each item has a colored bar that graphically indicates its score. Any occurrences of your search term are highlighted in the results list, as well as in the documents themselves, (partial-word matches aren’t highlighted, however).

Refine a Search with Search Options

If a simple search doesn’t return the results you’re looking for (or returns far too many results), you can click the triangle in the search field to display a pop-up menu with additional search options. Choose one of these to refine your search—and note that your choice remains in effect for future searches, too (even if you quit and reopen DEVONthink), until you change it, so you may wish to reset it right after use to avoid future confusion.

The first group of options, under the “Search for” label, affect where in each document DEVONthink searches:

• All: Searches everywhere—document contents and all metadata
• Content: Searches only document contents
• Name: Searches only document names
• URL: Searches only the URL (if any) associated with a document
• Comment: Searches only the contents of the Spotlight Comments field (accessible in the Info Panel)
• Metadata: Searches only metadata, including URLs and Comments

The pop-up search menu also contains several options that affect how a search is performed. Each one can be toggled independently, and those with a check next to them in the menu are currently active. The options are:

• In Selection: With this option selected, DEVONthink searches only selected items in the database.
• Prefix while Typing: Keep this option on to have DEVONthink return items containing words beginning with whatever letters you’ve typed—even before you press Return.

• Ignore Diacritics: With this option selected, DEVONthink ignores all diacritical marks (such as umlauts and accents) when searching, so, for instance, a search for “creme brulee” with this option enabled will match a document containing “crème brûlée”, and vice-versa.
• Fuzzy: With Fuzzy on, DEVONthink looks for alternative spellings with similar sounds (although I’ve rarely found this option to produce any useful effects).

Use the Search Window

If even the extra options in the search pop-up menu aren’t adequate to help you find what you’re looking for, you can pull out the big guns: the separate Search window (Figure 49), which you can display by choosing Tools > Search (Command-Shift-F).

The Search window does everything the search field does—it has radio buttons for where to search (All, Content, Name, URL, Comment, and Metadata) and checkboxes for how to search (Ignore Diacritics and Fuzzy), plus a series of pop-up menus with additional options:

• Flag: Choose On to search for only flagged items, Off to search for items without flags, and Any to ignore flags.
• Unread: Choose On to search for only unread documents, Off to search for only read documents, and Any to ignore documents’ read status.
• Locking: Choose On to search for only locked items, Off to search for unlocked items, and Any to ignore the lock state.
• Label: Choose a label from this menu to search for only items with that label, or Any to ignore labels when searching.
• Search In: To search in all databases at once (something you can’t do in the toolbar’s search field), choose Databases. To search in a specific database, group, or tag, select it from this menu.

After selecting search options and typing a term into the search field and specifying any other options you want, click the Search button. As usual, DEVONthink returns search results ranked in order of relevance, with search terms highlighted.

If you want even more control, click Advanced to display a dialog in which you can create and specify multiple search criteria just as you can for smart groups (described next).

Use Smart Groups

Suppose you construct an elaborate search that returns just the documents you’re looking for, and you realize you may have to search again later with the same criteria. Or, say you always want quick access to documents having some set of attributes, even though their tags, groups, and other metadata may change. In cases like these, you might be able to use a smart group, a type of saved search that appears much like a regular group—but whose contents change dynamically along with the contents of your database. You can create a smart group in two ways: save an advanced search (from the Search window) or use the Smart Group Editor (a method that provides more flexibility).

Save an Advanced Search

After performing a search in the Search window (as described just previously), click the plus button next to the search field. Type a name for the saved search and click OK. A new smart group with a special icon appears in your database.

Use the Smart Group Editor

For more advanced options, you can build a smart group from scratch. This method has two unique characteristics: you can include multiple conditions, and you get a much longer list of metadata types against which you can search. If you’re familiar with creating smart folders in the Finder, smart playlists in iTunes, or smart mailboxes in Mail, you’ll be at home in the Smart Group Editor.

To create a smart group with this method, follow these steps:

1. Choose Data > New > Smart Group.
2. In the Smart Group Editor (Figure 50), enter a name for your smart group.

   

3. Choose a search location from the Search In pop-up menu and optionally check Ignore Diacritics and/or Fuzzy—all these options work just as for other types of searches.
4. Enter your first search criterion. Start by selecting a predicate (that is, a search context) from the pop-up menu to the left of the word “matches.” You have dozens of choices, such as Content, Recipient (for email messages), Composer (for music), width (for graphics), word count, and date modified. (The exact options depend on the predicate. For example, you can choose [Content] matches some text, [Height] [Is Greater Than] number of pixels, or [Date Added] [Is] [This Year].)
5. Optionally, add more criteria. To do this, click the plus button to the right of the first criterion, and repeat Step 4 as necessary.

   When you have two or more criteria, you must tell DEVONthink whether to look for items that match all of them (choose All—the default—from the pop-up menu next to “of the following are true”) or items that match at least one of them (choose Any).

   You can also have compound predicates, which let you nest Any/All criteria so you can search using expressions like “(A or B) and C” or “A or (B and C).”

   To turn an existing single predicate into a compound predicate, Option-click the plus button to the right of any criterion; then choose Any or All from the new pop-up menu that appears below the existing criterion and fill in the details for the additional component just as in Step 4.

   Repeat as needed to create the set of conditions you’re looking for.

6. Click OK.

DEVONthink saves your new smart group—under Smart Groups in the sidebar if your search includes multiple databases, or at your current location in the database otherwise.

To display the smart group’s contents, click it, or click the triangle next to it (depending on the view). To make a smart group available in every view, drag it to the Smart Groups section of the sidebar.

Modify or Delete a Smart Group

To edit an existing smart group, double-click its name (or, in Icon View, right-click it and choose Edit from the contextual menu). The Smart Group Editor appears; make any changes you want and then click OK.

To delete a smart group from the sidebar, right-click (or Control-click) it and choose Delete from the contextual menu. To delete a smart group from a location other than the sidebar, select it and press Delete.

Search Using the Concordance

The final method of searching is to use the Concordance, which provides a list of all the words in a document (or your entire database), along with their usage frequency and other statistics.

To use the Concordance, select a single document and click the Concordance icon on the navigation bar above the edit pane (available in every view except Icon and List). A drawer appears on the right side of the window (Figure 51) with every word listed by frequency (number of occurrences).

You can click another column header to sort by length, weight (an indication of relevance in a given database), or alphabetically. Select a word, and DEVONthink highlights each occurrence of that word in the document. You can select multiple words by Command-clicking.

If your needs extend beyond a single document, such as analyzing word usage in a large corpus of texts, choose Tools > Concordance > Database Name, and a window like the one shown in Figure 52 appears. This window lists all the words in every document in your DEVONthink database, along with each one’s frequency, the number of groups in which it appears, its length, and its weight.

You can search for words using the search field at the upper right, click a column header to sort by that criterion, or use the controls at the bottom of the window to filter words by length or whether they contain numerals. If you double-click a word, a drawer appears, listing every document in which that word appears (sorted by frequency).