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ZetoPad

Search Guide

ZetoPad’s search engine is its superpower. It’s designed to help you find that one specific line of code from three years ago in milliseconds.

How Search Works

Just press Cmd+F (or start typing if the list is focused) to begin. As you type, ZetoPad ranks your snippets using BM25, a state-of-the-art ranking function used by search engines. It considers:

  • Term Frequency: How often your search terms appear in a snippet.
  • Uniqueness: Rare words are given more weight than common ones.
  • Length: Shorter, concise matches are prioritized.

Using Filters

You can narrow down your search using special prefixes. Combine them to be as specific as you need!

Filter by Language (lang:)

Only show snippets written in a specific language.

  • lang:python
  • lang:rust
  • lang:md (for Markdown)

Filter by Tag (tag:)

Find snippets you’ve organized with specific tags.

  • tag:api
  • tag:todo
  • tag:important

Filter by Folder (folder:)

Restrict search to a specific folder or path.

  • folder:work
  • folder:projects/backend
  • in:personal (You can also use in: or path:)

Filter by Date (created:, updated:)

Find snippets based on when they were created or last modified.

  • created:>2024-01-01 (Created after Jan 1, 2024)
  • updated:<7d (Updated more than 7 days ago)
  • created:w (Created within the last week)

Supported Date Formats:

  • Relative: d (days), w (weeks), m (months). E.g., updated:<2w (older than 2 weeks).
  • Absolute: YYYY-MM-DD. E.g., created:>=2023-12-01.

Advanced Search Techniques

Looking for a specific error message or function name? Wrap it in quotes.

"connection failed"

This finds snippets containing that exact phrase, in that order.

Need to find a pattern? Wrap your query in forward slashes /.

/function\s+get_\w+/

This regex finds Python/JS function definitions starting with get_.

3. Negation (NOT)

Exclude results by adding a minus sign - before a term.

python -django

This shows Python snippets that do not contain the word “django”.

4. Combining Everything

You can mix and match all these techniques for ultimate precision:

lang:typescript tag:auth "jwt token" -deprecated

Translation: Find TypeScript snippets tagged “auth” that contain the phrase “jwt token” but do NOT contain “deprecated”.

Pro Tip: Trigram Indexing

ZetoPad uses a trigram index for substring matching. This means you don’t have to type the whole word correctly.

  • Searching for config will find configuration.
  • Searching for algo will find algorithm.

It’s robust against minor typos and helps you find long variable names by just typing a part of them.