Add boolean operators to filters

To discover new thought relationships and ideas, allow for boolean operators with the graph and search in general. I can imagine combining a couple filters with two or three significant words all using the “OR” boolean operator. For example, city OR food OR parks OR #food OR #music has three terms, and two tags. That would result in a graph for cards with all those terms and filters. This type of search is currently not possible. AND, NOT, OR , and ( ) operations should be implemented.

To expand on the first search, imagine doing a second boolean search and adding it to the results of the first boolean search. The resulting graph would have two hemispheres of information, with some overlapping connections. With a third boolean search, and a fourth, etc., a new knowledge graph would grow based on the boolean searches. Selecting one of the boolean search strings would highlight the corresponding portion of the graph as a visual cue. The highlighted potion might look like glowing neurons when in dark mode.

(A boolean feature request has not been made yet, although @Tobias mentioned it in passing in the Thoughts and Feedback section a while back.)


To further refine a search, allow for a graph or search to display nodes or cards from within a selection of multiple parent cards (inclusive of their child cards) to the exclusion of other parent cards. On MacOS, for example, one could select multiple parent cards in the outline with the command key. This describes a different search feature, so I’ll make a separate request for simplicity.

Lastly, how does the graph work for people that organize mainly by tags and links? I believe there are a few Supernotes users that organize this way. (Since I prioritize organizing via parent and child cards with a fair number of links but just a few tags, maybe others can chime in who organize primarily via tags and links.) I just made a new feature request for tags as nodes.

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Loving the depth of this feature request @JohnCP, I got very excited about the idea of glowing neurons! “OR” filters would definitely a make a huge difference to the potential workflows, especially on the Graph View.

We have plans to completely overhaul how search and filtering works (to include OR operators, and multiple-parents etc), and this has already made it through the design stage. This will be another big big update though and we will possible tie this together with custom metadata, since the introduction of this will require the filtering overhaul. However for the meantime we are prioritising offline mode + building out our mobile apps.

Since using filtering with boolean operators and viewing your cards as a graph view are technically independent from each other, I would be tempted to rename this FR purely as “Add boolean operators to filters” – so we can link more easily to this topic in the future as I’m sure it will come up again. But I will leave that to your discretion @JohnCP!

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I just made the title change so the FR can easily be referenced in the future. The potential for such search results in the noteboard and the graph views is exciting. I can’t wait to see it in action. (Already, the graph view in this first iteration is helping my workflow.)

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+1 for a boolean NOT operator in filters. This would really improve their utility. At the moment it’s difficult to use them for certain exclusionary searches.