Search
Search is fast full-text search across your entire vault that finds any note by its content and lets you jump to it instantly.
Browsing is fine for a handful of notes. Once your vault grows, search becomes the fastest way in — type a few words and go straight to the note, heading, or line you meant.
Search your vault
Open search
Open search from the sidebar, or run it from the command palette.
Type what you remember
Enter any word or phrase. Altretta searches the full text of every note in the vault, not just titles.
Jump to a result
Results show the notes that match with the surrounding context. Pick one to open the note right at the match.
What you can search
- Full text — the body of every note, so you can find a note by something it says, even if you've forgotten its title.
- Titles and headings — land directly on the right note or the right section within it.
- Across your indexed notes — every note Altretta indexes, which is most but not all of your vault (see below).
Refining a query
Search understands more than plain words:
| Syntax | What it does |
|---|---|
"exact phrase" | Match the phrase, not the words separately |
-word | Exclude results containing that word |
a OR b | Match either term |
/regex/ | Match a regular expression |
tag:name | Restrict to notes carrying a tag |
path:folder | Restrict to a folder or path fragment |
What isn't searched
Search covers the notes Altretta indexes, which is deliberately narrower than everything the file tree shows you:
- Your trash and the review inbox staging area are excluded, so deleted notes and unapproved proposals never come back through search.
- Files in a hidden folder (one whose name starts with a dot) are excluded.
- Secret files — anything named
.envor.env.*— are excluded outright, and are not even listed in the file tree. - Files whose extension isn't a note, config or source format aren't indexed.
- Inside a git repository, anything your
.gitignoreexcludes is skipped too — which usefully keepsnode_modulesand build output out of your results.
.gitignore is respected only inside an actual git repository, and it is a tidiness signal rather than a security boundary. The rules that are boundaries — hidden folders and .env files — do not depend on it.
Separately, any folder you've added to excluded folders in the Trust panel stays out of what your AI can see. That's a different control from indexing: those notes are still yours to search, just not to share with a model.
Search vs. asking your AI
Search finds notes by what they contain. When you want an answer synthesized from across many notes — with citations back to the source — that's a job for Altretta's grounded, cited answers, where your own AI reads the vault over MCP and quotes exactly what it used. Search finds; grounded AI explains.
Related
Organizing your vault
The overview: files, bookmarks, daily notes, templates, Bases, and Maps & Manuals.
Bookmarks
Pin the notes you return to so they're always one tap away.
Grounded, cited answers ✦
When you want an answer synthesized across notes — with citations — not just a list of matches.
Maps & Manuals ✦
A living index of a whole area instead of a one-off search.
Command palette
Run search — and everything else — from the keyboard.