How to search only headlines?

[rieje]

I have extensive notes and often when I search something the results are headlines not containing the term searched followed by its lengthy contents that contain the term somewhere. As a result, the results are not really practical at all unless I have the time to read through the contents.

Much more often I only want to search for headlines that contain the terms and I think the results can be folded so I can only see the relevant headlines. Is this possible?

[mmarshall540]

I don't think this is currently possible with Orgzly.

I wasn't even sure if Emacs Org-mode provides this, but I was surprised to learn that it does! C-h f org-search-view explains that if you place an asterisk at the beginning of a text search query, Org will search only in headlines.

Attempting this in Orgzly still searches the full content of notes for the literal text searched, including the leading asterisk. We shouldn't really expect it to use the same syntax, since Orgzly uses its own search tokens to indicate which properties are being searched. But a review of the documentation doesn't reveal any search token for matching against the text of headlines

[amberin]

I don't think this is currently possible with Orgzly.

This is my impression, too. I can imagine that this is annoying with certain use patterns.

My guess is that we could pretty easily add a search keyword for matching headings. It would need to be carefully chosen, so it can be remembered and remain the same.

[mmarshall540]

I'm thinking h for heading could work. (Or maybe hd to disambiguate from the use of h when matching hours in a time range. But I believe that use of h must follow an integer.)

Unfortunately, while t is already assigned as the sort property for headings, it is also used as the search property for tags.

Maybe it would make sense to also add h (or hd) as an alias of t for sorting. It would be easier to remember if the same property name can be used in both contexts.