Feature request: Treat # character as letter in searches

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Currently only letters, numbers and a subset of letter-like symbols are searchable. Every other character gets ignored, i.e. treated as whitespace. Furthermore there seems to be no way to search for exact matches e.g. by quoting a string, or to perform a case sensitive search.

I have over 130 private and shared notebooks that I cannot organize in any meaningful way, because only public notebooks can be added to collections. To work around this limitation I would like to start adding tags to each notebook body, using the “#” character as a word boundary delimiter, e.g.:

md`# Notebook title`
/* #wip #3d #cleanup */
/* Alternative with "namespace": tag#wip tag#3d tag#cleanup */

The idea here is that the combination of words + # is rare enough to avoid (too many) false positives.

At present this does not work because e.g. “tag#3d” gets indexed/searched as “tag 3d”, performing partial matches for both “tag” and “3d”. It would be great if “#” could instead be treated as a letter, so that “tag#3d” would be considered a single word.

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I’ve based this feature request on the assumption that it would only require a minor configuration change and yield a good workaround until a better solution has been implemented.

@staff Would you consider adding this change? (Or do you already have something better in the pipeline? :smiley:)

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Hi @mootari,

We do have better things “in the pipeline” — in the sense that they’ve been discussed and we want to improve them — for both increasing the usefulness of the search index, and providing authors with more powerful ways to organize their notebooks.

But there’s a lot of other stuff on our plates that may get prioritized in advance…

That said, I’ll see what I can do to try and help enable private notebooks to be added to collections, as soon as possible…

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I’m well aware, that’s why I was hoping to offer a simple (but admittedly hackish) interim solution.

That would be highly appreciated! When I work on an idea it often spawns several other explorative notebooks before the original notebook even gets close to being finished.
At the moment I’ve completely lost track of many of the projects I started, and being able to organize private notebooks would help me to finally get a sizable number of them over the finish line.

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