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Patterns: search recipes

Ten query shapes you'll reach for more than once. Copy, paste, adapt.

The Finding things page teaches the shape of a question. This page is the cheat sheet — ten recipes that cover most of what you'll want to do, each with a command, an expected-shape output, and a one-line note on when to reach for it. The running corpus is the reading list from Your first story; a couple of recipes use branches.n4l or the chinese-notes corpus where the shape of the example requires it.

Shell escaping

\ is an escape character in bash/zsh. Commands below use double backslashes (\\notes, \\from) or quote the whole command ("\\notes brain"). Both work.

1. Orbit around a topic

When you want it: you remember a topic and want to see everything that points at it.

searchN4L "decision making"

0: "decision making"    in chapter: reading list

      -    (is the topic/theme of) - Thinking Fast and Slow
           -    (is a bibtex citation label for) - Superforecasting
      -    (is the topic/theme of) - Superforecasting
      -    (is the topic/theme of) - Thinking in Systems

The topic is the match; every book that pointed (about) at it is listed below. Indented lines are one hop further out — the graph walks a step beyond the immediate neighbours. Cap the walk with \\limit N.

2. Full orbit of one thing

When you want it: you remember a title and want everything you ever wrote about it.

searchN4L notes about "Thinking Fast and Slow"

0: "Thinking Fast and Slow" in chapter: reading list

      -    (is about topic/them) - decision making
      -    (is about topic/them) - heuristics
      -    (has author) - Daniel Kahneman
      -    (has bibtex citation) - Judgment under Uncertainty
           -    (has author) - Amos Tversky
           -    (note/remark) - the anchor is almost always the wrong number
      -    (note/remark) - two systems, one of them lazy, both of them you
      -    (is a bibtex citation label for) - Superforecasting

Every arrow in or out of the node, plus one hop further. When the node has a lot of connections, this is how you see them all at once.

3. Author's footprint

When you want it: you remember a person and want to see what they connect to across your notes.

searchN4L "Daniel Kahneman"

0: "Daniel Kahneman"    in chapter: reading list

      -    (is the author of) - Thinking Fast and Slow
           -    (is a bibtex citation label for) - Superforecasting
      -    (is the author of) - Judgment under Uncertainty

Two books by Kahneman you wrote down directly, plus the citation from Superforecasting one hop further — a relationship between two books that you never stated in a single note.

4. Path between two things

When you want it: you want the chain, not the neighbourhood. This needs (then) / (leads to)-style arrows in your corpus — see Finding paths for why.

pathsolve -begin "once upon" -end "a little prince"

against examples/branches.n4l:

     - story path: 1 * once upon  -(then)->  a time  -(then)->  there was
      -(=>)->  a princess  -(=>)->  mischief!  -(=>)->  a little prince

The specific route through the branching story. On a reading-list-style corpus ((about), (by), (bib-cite)), this will return "no paths available" because those aren't the kind of arrows pathsolve follows.

5. Scope to one chapter

When you want it: the same word appears in several chapters and you only want one.

searchN4L "bias" \\chapter "reading list"

The chapter filter narrows both the match and the walk. A reading-list bias won't drag in a statistics-chapter bias.

6. Scope to a context

When you want it: the same word means different things in different contexts, and you tagged your notes.

searchN4L "%%" \\context smalltalk brain wave \\limit 3

The %% is a wildcard name — match anything whose context includes smalltalk, brain, or wave. Context is a set, not a conjunction: any overlap counts. See Context for why.

7. Exact match for a short term

When you want it: your search term is a substring of too many other nodes.

searchN4L "!A!"

!A! (or |A|) forces a whole-node match. Without the bangs, A is a substring of thousands of strings in a big corpus. With them, only the literal node named A comes back.

8. Browse a chapter in order

When you want it: you want to read your notes in the order you wrote them, not in the order the graph returns them.

searchN4L "\\notes brain"
searchN4L "\\notes brain \\page 2"

This reflows the chapter from its original page order. Useful when the graph view scrambles the narrative and you want the authored sequence back.

9. Sequence browsing

When you want it: a chapter that was written as a sequence — tagged :: _sequence_ :: — and you want the items in story order.

searchN4L "\\seq \"Mary had\""

  0. Mary had a little lamb
  1. Whose fleece was dull and grey
  2. And when it reached a certain age
  3. She'd serve it on a tray

\seq, \sequence, \story, and \stories are interchangeable spellings of the same command.

10. Search without accents

When you want it: your keyboard can't produce the accented characters in the source, but you know the word.

searchN4L "(fangzi)" \\chapter chinese

0: fángzi
      -    (pinyin has hanzi) - 房子
           -    (hanzi has english) - house  .. at home, domestic

Parenthesised search terms hit the unaccented copy the graph keeps for exactly this purpose. (fangzi) finds fángzǐ, fángzi, and variations. Without the parentheses, fangzi matches the accented column and returns nothing.

Bonus: chapter statistics

When you want it: a quick summary of a chapter's shape — how many nodes, how many arrows, the dominant arrow types.

searchN4L "\\stats \\in brain"

For a deeper analysis (loops, sources, sinks, supernodes, centrality), graph_report is the dedicated tool; see the developer docs for its flags.

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