11.3.4 Search view

This agenda view is a general text search facility for Org mode entries. It is particularly useful to find notes.

M-x org-agenda s (org-search-view)

This is a special search that lets you select entries by matching a substring or specific words using a boolean logic.

For example, the search string ‘computer equipment’ matches entries that contain ‘computer equipment’ as a substring, even if the two words are separated by more space or a line break.

Search view can also search for specific keywords in the entry, using Boolean logic. The search string ‘+computer +wifi -ethernet -{8\.11[bg]}’ matches note entries that contain the keywords ‘computer’ and ‘wifi’, but not the keyword ‘ethernet’, and which are also not matched by the regular expression ‘8\.11[bg]’, meaning to exclude both ‘8.11b’ and ‘8.11g’. The first ‘+’ is necessary to turn on boolean search, other ‘+’ characters are optional. For more details, see the docstring of the command org-search-view.

You can incrementally and conveniently adjust a boolean search from the agenda search view with the following keys

[	Add a positive search word
]	Add a negative search word
{	Add a positive regular expression
}	Add a negative regular expression

Note that in addition to the agenda files, this command also searches the files listed in org-agenda-text-search-extra-files.