When thinking or learning, you'll frequently want to navigate around your Knowledge Base. RemNote provides a variety of fast and powerful search interfaces for doing so.

Searching your entire knowledge base

Press Ctrl+P (Cmd+P on a Mac) or click in the Search box in the upper-left corner to search your knowledge base from anywhere.

When search opens, you'll be presented with a short list of Rem you've recently used. If the Rem you're looking for isn't already in the list, just start typing to find it.

Once you've found the right Rem, click on it or press Enter to go there, or hold down Shift while clicking/pressing Enter to stay where you are and open the new Rem in another pane.

To limit your search to a particular section of your knowledge base, use Hierarchical Search.

Reference and portal search

You'll frequently make a Rem in one Document and then later want to refer to that Rem in a different Document. Type [[ to search for a Rem to reference, or (( to search for a Rem to add as a portal. Searching here works the same way as searching in the omnibar with Ctrl+P.

As an alternative method of adding a portal, use Ctrl+P search to find the Rem, then press Alt+Enter (Opt+Return on a Mac) on the highlighted result.

Select text to search

Whenever you select a piece of text in RemNote, your entire Knowledge Base will be searched for any matching text, to help you quickly find Rem that are about the same thing. Unlike Ctrl+P and reference/portal search, this searches only for exact matches on whole words; it will not include Rem that match only some of the text you've selected or Rem where the text you've selected is part of another word.

Selecting a Rem here will add it as a portal underneath the current Rem.

This feature can be toggled on and off using the magnifying glass icon in the toolbar.

Find/filter in document

In larger documents, you may need help finding your way around even after you've landed in the correct document. Pressing Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) will open a popup that allows you to:

go to occurrences of a particular word (Find)
hide all Rem that don't contain a particular word or have a particular tag (Filter)
carry out a find-and-replace of specific text on all Rem in the document (Replace)
hide all Rem that don't match arbitrary criteria (Query Filter)

If you type multiple words into the Find and Filter functions, RemNote will find all occurrences of any of the words.

Find in descendants

When looking at a Rem that has a large number of descendants, you can press Ctrl+Shift+C (Cmd+Shift+C on a Mac) to quickly select one that you want to move your cursor to.

How the Search Algorithm Works

RemNote uses a complex prioritization algorithm to decide how to order search results in Ctrl+P KB search and reference/portal search. A few tips that may help you decide how to design your Knowledge Base for optimum searching:

Search terms match only at the front of words in your Rem: searching for cat finds Rem containing cat or catenary, but not dedicate.
Search is not case-sensitive: cat is the same as Cat or cAt.
Documents and concepts are ranked higher than other Rem.
Items closer to the top of the hierarchy (“shallower”) are ranked higher.
Items you've recently accessed or access frequently are ranked higher.
When you enter multiple words, Rem whose full path through the hierarchy contains those words in order are ranked higher than those that merely contain all of them. (This allows you to type the name of a document, then a heading within it, then a Rem you're looking for under that heading, for example, and be virtually assured of finding it.)