The fact that Spotlight(and, other search engines like Foxtrot & Devonthink as well, for that matter) cannot search the notes within Tinderbox has been bothering me for a long time. One strategy I used over the years was to occasionally export my TB database to Finder; then, index the export folder to those search engines.
The problem with this strategy is that latest updates (notes) within TB will not be available to the search engines. I have to do export again, and again…
It works; but, a kind of hectic process.
I am now wondering if I have to move all my projects back to Devonthink and fully rely on the Autofetch feature to pull the notes back to TB.
Have any of you guys tried such a workflow? What is your experience?
DEVONthink is not a "search engine , though you can search the contents of files stored within (imported) or indexed by DEVONthink databases. These include XML files, which is what a Tinderbox file is.
Have you ever looked inside a Tinderbox document? The “notes” are there, but searching for a “note” in a Tinderbox document with DEVONthink is like searching for a paragraph in raw HTML – you can find words but you will not be viewing the note in the DEVONthink preview pane as a discrete “note” in the manner we see it when the file is opened in Tinderbox.
The idea of taking notes in DEVONthink and then importing them to Tinderbox – relying on AutoFetch for updates – isn’t a bad idea. It’s like taking notes in Simplenote and syncing them to Tinderbox.
yah, that is why searching the Tinderbox database (file) using Devonthink or Spotlight is more or less useless. The notes are not separated. The whole package is treated like a single note. Moreover, the preview of the XML is a meaninless junk (for me at least). that is why I don’t directly index it. but, this is off topic. The question is whether the Devonthink+Autofetch could be a tenable workflow in the long run.
One worry I have, for example, is that I won’t be able to directly edit the files inside TB as the Autofetch cannot push back the updates. Editing should always be done inside Devonthink. That is one major challenge.
I agree. Two-way would be nice. (Limited to documents that are text-based files in DEVONthink – .txt, .rtf, .md, and so on – since two-way on PDFs would be ugly.)