Ask HN: How to search notes?

1 pointxstartup2 comments

When I quickly scribble something in a text file, I find it difficult to search these files. It seems keyword search using grep is not enough and that we need some smart context-aware search.

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Are you referencing typing something in the notes or actually scribbling something using a digital pen/pencil or finger? If you are referencing just typing things in, normally grep -rI "" * --color=auto may help (if you are using the newer grep) for a small dataset or find /path/to/data -type f -a -exec grep -H WHATAMILOOKINGFOR '{}' \; which I will normally just turn into an function I can run from any terminal. For larger searching I normally use Solr, Lucene, ElasticSearch, Kibana, Sphinx and other tools to give me more technical vision into what I am searching for and/or things relative to what I was thought I was searching for.

For things that I have taken pictures of or manually drawn I use OCR and other custom tech to convert it to computer friendly searchable information to be able to include it into my search queries and create a helper app for Windows, MacOS, Linux and Unix to search through my apps API to give me both the textual, graphical and meta data results that I can then filter down to what I am looking for.

If you need something to help get you started on OCR of any notes or documents you have I would recommend looking into Tesseract as a start if you are not interested in building your own OCR tools from scratch.

I found the lack of grep so unbearable on Windows that I install cygwin (or whatever) in the initial setup of any new device. What does grep fail to do for you?

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