Search

Hook is primarily a context sensitive app, meaning that when you invoke Hook, it gives you information about the current context, as indicated in Hook’s title bar.

With Hook, when you copy a link or hook an item to another, Hook creates a bookmark in your Hook database. You can search your bookmarks as described next. (You can think of that as ‘searching your hooks’ or ‘searching for stuff you have previously linked’.)

Enter and Exit Search Mode.

Enter search mode with ⌘F or by clicking 🔍 icon

To view Hook’s search field:

  1. invoke Hook as you normally would (e.g., with ⇧⌘SPACE) ,
  2. type ⌘F, or click on the 🔍 icon in the Hook window Title bar, or click on the Gear icon and select Find

Exit search mode

To get out of search mode, back into context mode, you can either

  1. type ⌃⌘F,
  2. Gear menu > Show Context, or
  3. Close Hook Window and reopen it, because the default is always Context-sensitive mode.

Input and execute your search query

Once you’re in the search mode, enter your query in the search field and hit the return key. Hook’s search currently only starts when you hit return.

Hook search is not case-sensitive. There is a limit on the number of search results returned by Hook. It’s set to 50. The result is returned in the order of recency and relevancy.

Search syntax

Hook leverages the SQLite FT5 extension to support full text search. Most of the time, you only need to type in a keyword like you do in other search engines. The rest of the section describes some advanced options.

Wildcard matching with *

Currently, Hook only returns search results that exactly match the terms you enter, unless you use a wildcard operator.

So if you want to find all bookmarks containing Hookproductivity you can’t just type Hook. But you can type Hook* which will find everything that starts with Hook.

For instance, that would return any bookmark containing “hookproductivity” and “Hooks” in their name or URL.

Restricting search to the bookmark’s attributes.

A Hook bookmark contains four attributes: title, URL, path and name, where the latter two only apply to bookmarks referencing files. You can restrict the search to desired attributes.

For example, if you want to restrict your search to a particular kind of URL you can do so by using the url: parameter like the following:

  1. find only emails, you can type: url:"hook://email" because email URLs have this form: hook://email. This would also get you in the ballpark: "url:/email"
  2. to find OmniFocus bookmarks, you could enter url:"omnifocus://"
  3. to find only https bookmarks, you could enter url:"https://"
  4. to find only bookmarks to files or folders, you could enter "hook://file" or cast your net a bit wider with url:"file/"
Search for a phrase (exact string)

A phrase is an ordered list of space-separated words. You can concatenate words by using the “+” operator, or enclose the entire phrase in quotation mark.

Examples:

  • “omnifocus Travel”
  • Omnifocus + Travel

The above two queries are equivalent. They return any bookmark whose one of four properties matches “omnifocus travel”s

Search with starting phrase

To only find bookmarks whose URL or name start with a particular string of text, use ^.

Examples:

url:^OmniFocus

that will find URLs starting with OmniFocus

name:^Hook

that will find bookmarks starting with Hook

Boolean Operators

Search criteria can be combined with boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT.

Examples:

url:^omnifocus AND title:myproject

The above query returns any link with its URL scheme starting with “omnifocus” whose title contains “myproject”

title:Canada OR title:USA

The above query returns any link whose title contains either “canada” or “usa”, case insensitive.

Canada NOT "British Columbia"

The above query returns any link with “canada” but not “british columbia””

More search options

Hook search leverages SQLite FT5 full text extension. For the complete search syntax, please refer to SQLite FTS5 Extension

Using launchers (ObDev’s LaunchBar app or Alfred app)

Another way to search Hook’s bookmarks is to use launchers, as described here..