I’m struggling with a simple search for tags. I have a number of text files in a directory. These text files have a number of tags associated with them, one of them being “done” to indicate I have finished dealing with the details of the text file. I select the directory and I want to search for the non-existence of the tag “done” to show me the list of items I still need to look at. I select “tags” from the drop-down menu in the search field in the top-right of the Eaglefiler screen. I then type !done (or even -done) expecting this to show all text files that do not have the tag “done” associated with them. However, I get “no matches for search”.
Sorry, but for Tags searches EagleFiler only does (substring) matching for the tag name. It does not interpret Boolean operators like it does for Anywhere and Notes searches. To do this kind of search you would need a smart folder.
Or, personally, I use “unread” as my marker for files that are not done. That is easy to search or browse for.
But marking an item as “unread” just adds a tag that says “unread” so I would have the same issue as I would want to search for items that are “not unread” ;o)
Smart folders won’t work as I want to be able to search any given folder at any given time. Now worries, I’ll have a think about how else I can achieve my goal.
I did not realize that you wanted to be able to search for it both ways. Just curious: in what situations do you want to find files that are done?
Another idea is that you could have a smart folder that finds everything that’s not “done”. Then, every now and then, click on the smart folder, select all, and Batch Change to add a “notdone” tag.
I’m trying to see if I can use Eaglefiler as simple task manager so save me have to run another full-blown app which I don’t really need. Text files would work well as I write a lot of notes associated with individual taks. I wanted a way to distinguish between tasks that I had done and tasks that were incomplete in any given directory. A simple tag search seemed the obvious way to go.
Not sure that would give me what I want as I’m interested in particular directories an not the whole library.
I’ll just use two tags instead of one - “done” and “notdone”. Not as elegant but it will work ;o)
I see what you mean. I’ve had another play and I’m going to use colour labels for the “done” and “not done” status. That way I have a visual indicator in the list window as to the status of each “task” depending on the colour. I will then use “task” and “today” tags to indicate that the file is a task and which tasks I want to work on today. Then I’ll have some smart lists to show me all tasks of a particular status. Using dates in the format of 20130711 in the task titles will give me some scheduling ability and I can search for titles beginning with “2” for scheduled tasks and the absence of “2” for “someday” tasks. Any repeating tasks (there aren’t many) can go in iCal. That’s about all I’ll need ;o)