Quick open and search
Two ways to find things without clicking through folders: quick open when you know roughly what a document is called, and search when you remember what it says.
Open a document by title
Section titled “Open a document by title”Press Ctrl+P (Cmd+P) and type part of a title. The letters only need to appear in order, so qrep finds
“Quarterly report”. Before you type anything, your recently opened documents come first.
Run a command
Section titled “Run a command”Type > in quick open, or press Ctrl+Shift+P (Cmd+Shift+P). Commands include a new document or folder,
search, switching the view, showing the outline, comments or history, print, the theme, Editor settings, the trash,
the workspace home, and Help: documentation and Help: keyboard shortcuts.
Search documents you can open
Section titled “Search documents you can open”Press Ctrl+K (Cmd+K), click Search in the sidebar, or press / when you aren’t typing. Inside a
document’s text, Ctrl+K makes a link instead, so click outside the text first.
Search looks at titles and text, and shows each match with a short passage around it. It understands word forms, so “plan” also finds “planning”, and every word you type has to appear. Accents don’t matter: “cafe” finds “café”. You only ever see documents you can open.
Matches in titles and headings rank higher than matches in the body. Web addresses and markdown symbols aren’t searched, so a search for “https” or ”##” won’t fill the list with noise.
New text can take up to a minute to show up in search.
If nothing matches, search may offer a corrected spelling, such as Did you mean roadmap? Choose it to put those
words in the search box. Suggestions come only from words in documents you can open, and words in quotes or after -
stay as you typed them.
Related pages
Section titled “Related pages”Search finds the words you type, and related pages about the same thing, even when they use different words. Words match as you type. After a short pause, up to 5 related pages show under a Related pages heading, below the word matches: a search for “time off” can find a page called “Holiday policy”. Each one shows the passage closest to what you typed, and opens at that section.
It’s on by default. To search by words only, turn off Related pages in search in Editor settings, under Search. A workspace’s Owners and Admins can turn it off for everyone in Settings, Search. When it’s off, the search footer says so.
Enter always opens the highlighted result. Use the arrow keys to highlight another one.
Searches with quotes or -word match words only, so they show no related pages. Quick open always matches titles by
their letters.
Related pages searches the published documents you can open. Drafts and code blocks are left out. It runs on our own servers: nothing you write or search for is sent to another service, and it isn’t used to train anything.
Narrow a search
Section titled “Narrow a search”| You type | It finds |
|---|---|
"weekly sync" | the exact phrase, words together and in that order |
roadmap OR plan | documents with either word |
budget -draft | “budget”, leaving out documents that mention “draft” |
The search box shows a short reminder of these.
Open a result at the right place
Section titled “Open a result at the right place”Choosing a result opens the document at the section that matches best. If the document matches in more places, the result says so, for example “3 more matches in this document”. Press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F) in the document to step through them.
Front matter
Section titled “Front matter”If a document starts with front matter, its title, tags and aliases are searched too, so a document is found
by any name you’ve given it.