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This is the community forum for my apps Pythonista and Editorial.
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Boolean operator support in Global Search workflow?
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Ole,
I'm aware that this doesn't exist at the moment but would it be possible to add at some point.
If any other Python experts has a view on this, it would be good to hear too.
For me the challenge seems to be speed. At the moment global search is still pretty slow on single words/phrases (when searching a large doc folder - in my case my nvAlt/Notesy folder) so to add boolean operators would probably hinder speedy response further without some form of spotlight type indexing service running too.
Now that IOS is a great document creation tool it seems to me that the next task at hand on IOS is a smart way of indexing those documents (local or cloud based) so that you're able to get a Devonthink Pro desktop style search experience. The Devonthink team made a hash of things with Devonthink To Go, so I wonder if something could be built into Editorial at some point in the future. It would seem that this type of feature would need to be built natively in Objective-C as a scripted solution via Python would probably be far too slow.
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No further thoughts on this from anybody?
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I'm currently tinkering with the
whoosh
module, which is a pure-Python full-text search engine that supports boolean operators, wildcards and a lot more...It's definitely possible to get it to work in Editorial, but I'm not sure yet how well it performs. Overall, performance of things like this depends more on algorithms than on the language, so I think there's a good chance this will be fast enough, but I haven't really tested it on a larger data set yet. I'll share it here when I'm a bit further along.
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Cheers for the update Ole. The Whoosh library looks really cool. Can't wait to see it in action in Editorial of your tinkering reaps some usable results.
I'm really hoping that IOS 8 brings OS X tagging over to IOS too, as that will make life a whole lot easier too. It's unbelievable that Apple finally introduced tagging to OS X and didn't see the UX through by making tagging central to IOS too! A Finder on OS X that can make intelligent use of tags and an IOS flavour of Finder to bring that experience over to mobile devices - now we're cooking!