Omnisearch for Obsidian

Omnisearch is a search engine that "just works". It always instantly shows you the most relevant results, thanks to its smart weighting algorithm.

Under the hood, it uses the excellent MiniSearch library, and obsidian-text-extract for PDFs and images.

Features

Omnisearch's first goal is to locate files instantly. You can see it as a Quick Switcher on steroids.

Find your 📝notes, 📄PDFs, and 🖼images faster than ever
- Images OCR and PDF indexing are only available on desktop
Automatic document scoring using the BM25 algorithm
- The relevance of a document against a query depends on the number of times the query terms appear in the document, its filename, and its headings
Keyboard first: you never have to use your mouse
Workflow similar to the "Quick Switcher" core plugin
Fuzzy search
Switch between Vault and In-file search to quickly skim multiple results in a single note
Supports "expressions in quotes" and -exclusions
Directly Insert a [[link]] from the search results
Supports Vim navigation keys

Note: support of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. depends on this additional plugin. Please read its documentation for more information.

Installation

Omnisearch is available on the official Community Plugins repository.
Beta releases can be installed through BRAT. Be advised that those versions can be buggy and break things.

You can check the CHANGELOG for more information on the different versions.

Usage

Omnisearch can be used within 2 different contexts:

Vault Search

Omnisearch's core feature, accessible with the Command Palette "Omnisearch: Vault search". This modal searches through your vault and returns the most relevant notes. That's all you need to find a note.

If you want to list all the search matches of a single note, you can do so by using tab to open the In-File Search.

In-File Search

Also accessible through the Command Palette "Omnisearch: In-file search". This modal searches through the active note's content and lists the matching results. Just press enter to automatically scroll to the right place.

URL Scheme & Public API

You can open Omnisearch with the following scheme: obsidian://omnisearch?query=foo bar

For plugin developers and Dataview users, Omnisearch is also accessible through the global object omnisearch (window.omnisearch)

This API is an experimental feature, the ResultNote interface may change in the future. The search() function returns at most 50 results.

// API:
{
  // Returns a promise that will contain the same results as the Vault modal
  search: (query: string) => Promise<ResultNoteApi[]>
}

type ResultNoteApi = {
  score: number
  path: string
  basename: string
  foundWords: string[]
  matches: SearchMatchApi[]
}

type SearchMatchApi = {
  match: string
  offset: number
}

Dataview Integration

You can use the Omnisearch API directly within the Dataview plugin.

```dataviewjs
const results = await omnisearch.search('your query')
const arr = dv.array(results).sort(r => r.score, 'desc')
dv.table(['File', 'Score'], arr.map(o => [dv.fileLink(o.path), Math.round(o.score)]))
```

CSS Customization

There are several CSS classes you can use to customize the appearance of Omnisearch.

.omnisearch-modal
.omnisearch-result
.omnisearch-result__title
.omnisearch-result__counter
.omnisearch-result__body
.omnisearch-highlight
.omnisearch-input-container
.omnisearch-input-field

For example, if you'd like the usual yellow highlight on search matches, you can add this code inside a CSS snippet file:

.omnisearch-highlight {
  color: var(--text-normal);
  background-color: var(--text-highlight-bg);
}

See styles.css for more information.

Issues & Solutions

Omnisearch makes Obsidian sluggish/freeze at startup.

While Omnisearch does its best to work smoothly in the background, bigger vaults and files can make Obsidian stutter during indexing.
If you have several thousands of files, Obsidian may freeze a few seconds at startup while the Omnisearch cache is loaded in memory.

Omnisearch is slow to index my PDFs and images

The first time Omnisearch indexes those files, it needs to extract their text. This can take a long time, but will only happen once. This process is also resumable, so you can temporarily disable PDFs/images indexing, or close Obsidian without losing data.

Can I index PDFs/images on mobile?

Not at the moment. On mobile devices, text extraction either doesn't work or consumes too much resources.

Omnisearch gives inconsistent/invalid results, there are errors in the developer console

Restart Obsidian to force a reindex of Omnisearch.
The cache could be corrupted; you can clear it at the bottom of the settings page, then restart Obsidian.

A query should return a result that does not appear.

If applicable, make sure that "Ignore diacritics" is enabled.
If you have modified them, reset weightings to their original values.
Rewrite your query and avoid numbers and common words.

How do I highlight matches in search results?

See here.

I'm still having an issue

You can write your issue here with as much details as possible.

LICENSE

Omnisearch is licensed under GPL-3.

Thanks

To all people who donate through Ko-Fi or Github Sponsors ❤

jessmartin/obsidian-omnisearch