Full Text Search for Markdown and other Text Documents

[ChrisL8]

I am trying to use the full text search feature, however it seems very limited.

According to the documentation and my experiments, Dropbox only indexes the contents of text files with a .txt extension.

However, Dropbox can Preview a wide range of files that contain only text, including .md files.

Is there a way to get Dropbox to index file extensions other than .txt as Text content?

If not, can this feature be added?

[Hannah]

Hey everyone, this idea has been closed as it has reached the end of the Share an Idea process.

Thank you for your suggestion, and if you have another idea to share, please do!

[Rich]

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@ChrisL8 wrote:

Is there a way to get Dropbox to index file extensions other than .txt as Text content?

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No, there isn't.

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If not, can this feature be added?

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Moving your post to the Share an Idea section.

[troybail]

This would be a very helpful addition. Since markdown files are simply text files, it would be great if the developers could add *.md and *.markdown to the list of files indexed. Even simply treating them as another kind of text file would be fine. Thanks!

[bugie]

I'm also missing this feature. But I ask myself if feature requests like this will be considered at all. Is this the offical way how to request features?

[malkab]

Please, please, please... add this feature, please. It doesn't seem to be too complicated since .txt are being indexed.

This can be so great.

[Daphne]

This idea is going to need a bit more support.

We've updated the status to encourage more users to back you up!

[halejm]

I'm adding my vote.  This is a no brainer.  I can't believe it is not already supported.  I might switch back to OneDrive if not implemented because it works there. 

And I would add it should index all text file regardless of the extension.  I have thousands of plain text source code files stored in Dropbox that I would like to be able to search as well.

[karsha2]

Hello, you have the best preview of txt files. Very quick, mail and phones links, etc. But i need the string search possibility into the big txt files. Please, please, make it for us! Thank you!

[Triantor]

Absolutely required and shouldn't require significant dev effort as it's treating a markdown file no differently than a txt file. With more solutions like Obsidian popping up for markdown management people will look for ways to store their seconds brains with retention capabilities.

[Schwifty]

Adding my vote. I'm in that growing group of users who are moving (from Evernote) to Obsidian and/or Markdown.

Using Dropbox to keep my notes backed up and searchable seemed like a no-brainer at first. Discovering that .md-files aren't indexed even though they are just plain text was... surprising.

Since this thread is the top result when Googling: "does Dropbox index markdown", I'll add this for anyone looking for a solution:

It looks like Google Drive does index .md-files. You may want to consider backing up your Obsidian vaults there for the time being.

[Hannah]

Thank you for the idea, while we can’t take every idea forward we do regularly re-review and will update you if anything changes!