Feature Request: notes grep should show the notes content entries

[arael]

I think that notes grep command should not only list the notes title but also show the lines where the pattern has been found.

[pimterry]

I'd like to do that, but it's slightly tricky since it's useful to be able to pipe the matched filenames elsewhere (notes grep <pattern> | notes open). I think there's two options:

• Add a --show-matches option to do this
• Detect whether your output is going to a pipe or a tty, and show more or less detail based on that (as discussed on Feature Request: notes cat command #9 too).

What do you think?

[arael]

I see. Perhaps we could use a different command such as notes cgrep or notes lines.
I think the --show-matches is too long but it would avoid having a new command.

[pimterry]

What about the 2nd option? If notes grep normally printed output that including matching details, but didn't included those details when piped, would that work for you?

E.g. like this:

> notes grep <pattern>
my-note.md:
blah blah blah *matching text* blah blah
another-note.md:
more *matching text* blah blah

> notes grep <pattern> | cat
my-note.md
another-note.md

[arael]

That would be very handy. But I am afraid the users would expect the pipe to contain the content as well and not only the file list.

[pimterry]

I've opened a new ticket (#22) tracking the underlying issue here: we need a way to get snippets of any set of notes that doesn't break piping. I'm going to close this and track it over there - feel free to add your opinions there, or start looking at implementation options. Thanks for getting involved!