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Note

Start this with cadmus search

What does it do

This starts a search dialog with a preview of the note on the side.

How Do I use it

Warning

This requires recoll set up to index your notes directory.

After running the command type in a query just like you would with Google, matches will be presented with an instant preview to the side.

Press Ctrl+Q to toggle search inside the note for a string (there will not be highlighting) 1

Pressing Enter on a note will open it in the default app, 2 if you want to do something else with it copy the path to the clipboard with Alt+w as described below in Keyboard Shortcuts.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Keys Description
PgUp / PgDn Scroll Preview
Ctrl-w Copy Absolute path to note 3
Alt-w Copy Relative path to note
Ctrl-o Open the note in the default app without exiting
Alt-y Copy File Contents to Clipboard 4

When Would This Be Used

Imagine you're sitting at your desk and this time you need to, solve a linear recurrence relation, you're solution is cadmus search and then type something like linear recursion then Ctrl-Q math mod.

Example

How does it Work

So essentially this just uses skim and bat to filter/preview the notes, the interactive command is used with ripgrep and piping (that took me forever to figure out!!) to highlight the match in the preview.5 This is the code that achieves it:

        sk -m -i -c 'recoll -b -t -q "ext:md" {}                 |\
                cut -c 8- | sed s/^/realpath\ \"/                     |\
                sed s+\$+\"\ --relative-to\ \"./\"+ | bash'            \
            --bind pgup:preview-page-up,pgdn:preview-page-down    \
            --preview "bat --color=always --line-range :500           \
                    --terminal-width 80 --theme=TwoDark {+}           \
                    --italic-text=always                              \
                    --decorations=always"                             \
            --color=fg:#f8f8f2,bg:-1,matched:#6272a4,current_fg:#50fa7b,current_bg:#381070,border:#ff79c6,prompt:#bd93f9,query:#bd93f9,marker:#f1fa8c,header:#f1fa8c

  1. The distinction between this and find is essentially the distinction between grep and a search engine. ↩

  2. xdg-open / open on Linux/Mac respectively ↩

  3. TODO: this only works on Xorg at the moment ↩

  4. This is really good for Zulip / Discord ↩

  5. This highlighting works with both bat and MDCat, I prefer MDCat but there is a bug with footnotes preventing me from being able to use it right at the moment. ↩