5 More Hidden Features for Better Productivity

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In one of our previous articles I presented five useful hidden features of CintaNotes. Today we’ll examine another five features of CN which are not immediately visible in the UI, but have good chances to save you quite a bit of your valuable time.

6. Quickly search the whole notebook

As usual, let’s start with a “must-know-about” feature. One of the most frequently asked questions is “How do I search in ALL my notes, not only the active section?”

The answer is: simply double click on any section, or press Ctrl+Shift+Space. This will select all sections, and will enable you to search the whole notebook.

By the way, you might remember that when sections first appeared in CintaNotes 2.0, as soon as you created a new section beyond the default one, a special “All” button appeared to the left of the section tabs. Later it was removed because people kept thinking that it was a section, and because it made the UI bulky. But you still can bring it back if you want to, by setting the sectionbar.allsectionsbutton.displayed parameter to 1 in the cintanotes.settings file. However, I can’t guarantee that this button will still be around in future versions of CN.

7. Bulk note tagging

This feature is not hidden very deep (it has its own menu item, after all), but it is extremely powerful and is heavily underused. To bulk-tag a number of notes, select them, press the F4 key, and enter the tags to add ro remove into the “Add tags” and “Remove tags” boxes.

This is very handy if you want to quickly save current view of notes for further use. Press Ctrl+A to select all currently visible notes and press F4 to tag it with some descriptive tag. If you have PRO license, here you can also use tag hierarchy to make such “saved searches” grouped under some name on the Tag sidebar, for example “*/LargeNotes”.

8. Multiple clipping hotkeys

Wouldn’t it be nice to have different hotkeys for clipping work-related and personal notes? CintaNotes only allows one clipping hot key, this is true. But no one says that you have to use only one instance of CintaNotes!

Make an additional copy of CintaNotes (using the portable version is most convenient for this, but not strictly necessary). The two instances need to use different notebooks. Now you can configure different hot keys in each instance, and select different color themes so that the color of the tray icon is also different and you can tell the instances from each other.

9. Keyboard-only complex tag selections

If you’re a power user of CintaNotes, you probably already know that CintaNotes allows to create complex tag selections using Ctrl-, Alt-, and Shift-clicking on the Tag sidebar. However, many don’t know that the same functionality is available from keyboard, when you enter tags into the search box.

Example 1: You have Tag1 and Tag2 and want to see notes having both of them. Type “Tag1 Tag2” and press Enter (or Ctrl+Enter).

Example 2: You have Tag1 and Tag2 and want to see notes having either of them. Type “Tag1 Tag2” and press Shift+Enter.

Example 3: You have Tag1 and would like to see notes which don’t have it. Type “Tag1” and press Alt+Enter.

Note that the Alt+Enter shortcut also works when some tags are already selected. This means that you can create complex selections by combining the actions from Examples 1-3, like this:

Example 4: You want to select notes that have Tag1 or Tag2 and at the same time don’t have Tag3. Type “Tag1 Tag2” and press Shift+Enter, then type “Tag3” and press Alt+Enter.

10. Removing duplicate notes

CintaNotes doesn’t have a separate feature for removing duplicates, but you can take advantage of the fact that the Import feature can do it.

Simply create a new notebook and import your old notebook into it. If you don’t activate the “Allow duplicates” option, all duplicates will be skipped during the import process. After import is completed, CintaNotes will display an information dialog which contains the number of skipped duplicates. Then you can save the new notebook under the name of the old one.

Well, that’s all for today. Hope that you’ll find the tips above useful and that they will help you stay on top of things!

 

P.S. Even the basic edition of CintaNotes can make a huge difference to your ability to collect and analyze information. But to make the most of it and get access to advanced features like Simplenote syncing, hierarchic tags and file attachments, you’ll need CintaNotes PRO. The license costs only $39, with full money back guarantee, and also you can get a free 10-day trial key at any time before ordering.

Please consider upgrading to the PRO version – it will help us keep the project going and implement more useful features in future CN versions. Thank you!

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