Search & shortcuts¶

The fastest way to get anywhere in Initiative isn't clicking. It's typing.

Search¶

Press Cmd+K on a Mac, Ctrl+K on Windows or Linux. On a phone, tap with three fingers. There's a Search entry near the top of the sidebar too, if you'd rather click, though you probably won't for long.

Start typing and answers appear as you go. You don't have to finish the word, and you don't have to finish the first word. Results are ranked, so the thing you almost certainly meant is sitting at the top.

Arrow keys move through results. Enter jumps. For more than a quick jump, hit Enter on See all results.

What it looks through¶

Everything in the community you're in:

• Tools — projects, queues, counter groups, calendars, dashboards, posts, galleries, wikis.
• What's inside them — tasks, queue items, counters, calendar events, pictures, wiki pages.
• Files, and their actual contents. Not just titles: the words inside a text document, the text on a whiteboard, the cells and sheet names in a spreadsheet.
• Comments on any of the above.
• Tags and people. Search for somebody's display name or handle and you also find what mentions them — type it in whole words.

It only ever returns things you already have access to. Search will never quietly reveal that something exists by refusing to show it to you.

The results page¶

It names the community it's searching, so there's never any confusion about which one you're in.

Results are grouped into tabs — Tools, Members, Comments, Tags — opening on Tools, where most things live. Every tab stays clickable so you can check for yourself, and an empty one says it's empty rather than going mysteriously grey.

Each result shows the line that matched, with your words highlighted, so you can tell which of five similarly-named files is the right one before opening any of them.

Archived things are left out unless you switch Include archived on.

When you don't spell it right¶

Which is most of the time, and is fine:

• Half a word is enough. Type comm and things called "Community" come back.
• A misspelling still finds it. If nothing matches what you typed, Initiative offers the closest names it can find and tells you that's what it's doing.

Same goes for people's names. You do not have to memorise how your colleague spells theirs, and you certainly don't have to ask them again.

The same search is behind every picker¶

Mentioning something with #, linking with [[, attaching a file to a project, choosing what a smart chip points at — all the same search underneath, ranking and forgiving typos in exactly the same way. See Mentions & links.

The recent-items tab bar¶

Projects, tasks and files stack up as tabs along the top, like browser tabs. Click to go back to one; close it when you're done.

You can cap how many it keeps (1 to 100) in My Settings → Preferences, if you'd like that limit enforced rather than merely intended.

Keystrokes worth knowing¶

There's a fuller list on the keyboard shortcuts page.