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What note-taking app has *actually* helped you grow your thinking in unexpected ways?
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Posted by Lucine
Nov 18, 2023 at 11:37 AM
MadaboutDana wrote:
I would say the app that still inspires me and finds me new ideas is
>FoxTrot Pro, the Mac search app.
>
>You can index anything (or exclude stuff, too), which happens at very
>high speed. You can then search by an enormous range of criteria, and
>view the results in their own pane, with all hits highlighted (in
>different colours, if you’ve been searching for multiple terms) and a
>simple “previous/next hit” arrow system for skipping between them.
>
>The nearest Windows equivalent is dtSearch (very similar, also very
>powerful).
>
Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but for PDFs, dtSearch converts it to its own text format losing all the formatting and not rendering paragraphs correctly, and then only shows a dry list of non-clickable paragraphs that contain the search term. It doesn’t open the document where the search term is found, the only option you have in the menu is to open the document with your default pdf reader.
I’ve been using AtlasTi for searching within PDF documents, it has a good inbuilt search, maybe not as powerful as DtSearch’s but you can still do a lot. You can choose to display search results at the word, sentence or paragraph level. You can search by group of documents, and the results are displayed in a neat table, which you can jump to in the context with the in-built pdf reader. You can also tag the search results (called “coding” in their lingo) which can be a way to save the search for later use. You can also organize the tags into tag groups and see the results in other contexts, etc.
But even just for ordinary PDF search, I’ve been using AtlasTI because you can display the results in its paragraph context, so quickly see where the concept I want to find is located.