Text editors with "smart folder" / "saved search" / filter functionality

Posted by yosemite
Sep 11, 2015 at 06:37 PM

That sounds very specific… perhaps you could program or script it yourself, in an editor like sublime, atom, jedit, etc.

I do know of something that will do this though - it’s workflowy! It’s not a text editor, and it doesn’t have “multiple documents”, so it probably won’t suit your needs. But it’s interesting because it can do exactly this - save powerful filters. For example I focus/hoist/zoom in to any part of my outline and then put this in the search box:

ant bear OR trip buy

...and it will highlight in yellow all those search terms, and show only those lines that either (1) contain “ant” and “bear” anywhere on the line, OR (2) contain “trip” and “buy” anywhere on the line, OR (3) both (that is, all four terms, even if interspersed).

I can then “star” this and it saves my current focus/hoist/zoom level along with that search term/pattern. Later if I go to this “starred page” it performs that search again, and it will find whatever results exist then (could be less or more depending on what’s changed).

Also the search is “as you type” aka incremental and results show immediately with every keystroke.

Note workflowy search can do “AND”, “OR”, “NOT”, and quoted strings. It can’t do regular expression search syntax, which is another thing that most of the powerful text editors can do.