Filtering

When your maps get large, it can be helpful to filter those topics that you’re specifically interested in. For example, you might want to highlight those topics with a due date in the next few days or those topics that were modified yesterday.

iThoughts has a powerful ‘query language’ that enables you to describe those topics you’re most interested in. This is described in detail here.

Some example queries might be:

progress=100

shape=2

priority=1 and icons like '%smiley%'

…which I hope are reasonably self-explanatory?

Once you’ve described the topics you’re interested in, then you can either show or hide those topics (and/or the branches on which they live.) iThoughts will ‘dim out’ topics as appropriate.

By default, when showing topics matching a filter, iThoughts will expand any branches containing matching topics (and collapsing those branches that don’t.) This behaviour can be disabled in the System Settings.

Other Stuff

  • Saved filters are automatically synced between iOS and Mac devices (assuming iCloud is configured.) To get those same filters on Windows, I’m afraid you’ll need to manually copy/paste the info.

  • Once a filter is applied you can ‘Select All’ and only those visible (non-dimmed) topics will be selected. You can then manipulate them as a whole (perhaps setting their progress or priority etc?)

    • CMD+A (Mac)

    • CTRL+A (Windows)

    • Tap on the canvas and choose ‘Select All’ (iOS)

  • The currently active filter is saved along with the map (and restored when the maps is next opened.) Filters are not considered ‘worthy of saving’ on their own - so if you open a map, apply a filter and want it saving along with the map then you should specifically save the map before closing it (or make a change to the map that is ‘worthy of saving’ - such as moving a topic.)

  • Searches of the text and notes fields will search the text as it appears on screen NOT the underlying Markdown formatted text.

Filtering is quite a complex beastie - but there is plenty on the internet regarding SQLite WHERE clauses - and you can alway email me…