Search and replace

Searching

Press ⌘F, click Find on the Home or Review tab, or type in Search notebooks in the title bar. Results update as you type.

Search is literal: it finds the exact characters you type, not word forms or patterns. It ignores case unless Match case is on, and with Whole words it only finds matches that are not part of a longer word.

Each result shows the page title, its notebook and section, and the text around the match. A page title, a note or a table gives one result each; for a table, the first matching cell. Up to 200 results are listed.

Click a result, or press Return for the first one, to open its page with the match selected: in the title, in the note's editor, or in the table cell. Esc or the ✕ closes the pane.

Text in pictures and handwriting

Notr reads the text in your pictures and handwriting with macOS's own text recognition, on your Mac, and searches it along with everything else: a screenshot of an invoice turns up when you search for its number. A hit in a picture says Picture: and selects the picture; a hit in handwriting says Handwriting: and opens the page. Only All content searches this text.

Reading happens in the background, one picture or page at a time: when you insert or import a picture, a few seconds after you stop writing by hand, and, at start, for anything not read yet, so a large notebook may take a while to become searchable the first time. Printed text reads well; handwriting depends on how clearly it's written, and works best in English. Looking for what to read next costs little: a picture is hashed once, and a page's strokes again only after the page changes.

To-dos across notebooks

Home › All To-Dos (⇧⌘T, or View › All To-Dos) opens the search pane on Open to-dos with an empty search, so it lists every unticked to-do in the chosen scope, grouped by page. Tick the box in front of one to complete it right there; it leaves the list, and ⌘Z brings it back. Choose Completed to-dos to see the ticked ones and untick them the same way. Click a to-do's text to go to it on its page. Type in the search field to narrow the list.

Finding tags

Home › Find Tags lists every tagged note and every to-do in all notebooks, with a ★, ☐ or ☑ and the page it's on. Choose one to open it.

Replace

Review › Replace or ⌥⌘F opens Replace text, prefilled with the current search.

• Find and Replace with are literal text.
• The search scope, Match case and Whole words work as in the search pane.
• Replace All changes note text and table cells. Page titles, tags and file names are never changed.
• Formatting between matches is kept, and each replacement takes the formatting of the text it replaces. Containers grow or shrink to fit their new text.

When it's done, a bar under the ribbon reports how many matches were replaced in how many containers and pages. The whole replacement is one step: the bar's Undo reverts it, as long as nothing else has changed since.