One search, over everything
Title, text, tags and transcript, with filters by notebook and tag and three sort orders. It is a full-text index in the database, not a loop over notes: it handles tens of thousands of notes without slowing down.
Sound familiar?
«I know I wrote it down. I can't find it.»
It was in a note, or in a PDF attached to a note, or in a photo of the whiteboard. Search finds everything except that. You scroll through notebooks by hand, like flipping binders, and meanwhile the meeting has started.
What happens today
- Search only looks at titles, or only at one notebook's notes, and doesn't tell you.
- Whatever is inside an attached PDF or Word file is invisible: to search it is a blob of bytes.
- The photo of the whiteboard, the label, the ticket: you find it only if you remember the day.
- You tagged the same thing three ways: “client”, “clients”, “Client”.
How gethrs solves it
Inside files too
The text of attached PDFs, Word, Excel and text files enters the index when you upload them. Search for a word on page twelve of a contract, and the note with that contract shows up.
Inside photos too
If you turn on text reading, a whiteboard photo or a scanned PDF is found by a word written on it. The server reads the text in the background, after the upload.
Tags that don't split
While you type a tag, the app suggests the ones that already exist, so three variants of the same word never appear. Each tag has a colour, and crosses notebooks.
In practice
- Attach a PDF you know well to a note and wait a few seconds.
- Search for a word that is inside the PDF, not in the title: the note shows up.
- Narrow down with a notebook or tag filter, or change the sort order.
Questions
- How long does it take to index an attachment?
- The text of a PDF or Office file is extracted on upload. Reading photos and scans is asynchronous: a few seconds, sometimes a minute, and from then on the note is findable.
- Does search work offline?
- Notes you have already seen reopen without a connection and you can scroll through them; full search, with attachments, needs the server. As soon as you are back online it is all there.
- Does it search the trash?
- The trash has its own view: a trashed note does not appear in results, but it is not lost. Restore it whenever you want.
Other problems we know
- “Evernote keeps costing more”One .enex file and your notes are here: notebooks, tags, attachments, checklists.
- “Every app now writes for me”Zero AI in the editor. Two features that use a model, off until you switch them on.
- “My to-dos live in three places”A checkbox in a note is a task: due date, reminder, priority, in the Tasks area and the calendar.
- “No connection, it won't open”Local copy and a save queue: read and write in the tunnel, it goes out by itself later.
- “After the meeting nobody knows who does what”A note with participants and time, decisions that become tasks with an assignee, shared with those who were there.
- “I'm afraid of getting locked in”Export everything in a readable file, anytime. A read password on sensitive notes.