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!

[Servinjesus1]

+1 For all Zettelkasten users, this feature is a must! And really, surprising as a missing feature of Dropbox, given it already indexes non-text-based and more complicated filetypes like PDFs, Office files, etc.

[elegant]

+1 need this feature

[bcdav]

MD files are just plain text. What's the hold-up? Is the dev so busy that he/she can't add `md` to the list of indexed plain text file extensions?

[malkab]

@bcdav, completely agree, this is really weird and hard to understand. Given the ability to index .txt is in place, it's hard to understand any reason to not index .md ones. As you said, as a developer, it seems to me it's just a matter of telling the indexer to go through Markdown too. For sure there is a reason to delay this. Maybe the amount of .md files in Dropbox is really large, but given it is a much technical format than .txt, I doubt there are that far more files in Markdown than plain text. I wonder if the reason is not to pollute the indexer somehow with the little additional marks that Markdown adds, kind of **whatever**, and they think they must go first with a mark-free version on the text prior to indexing, which undoubtfully is more work than just indexing "raw" Markdown. As a Markdown user is needles to say that a plain indexation even including marks is more than enough for my use case.

[bcdav]

I agree with you, @malkab. Markup showing up as part of the search results is not a problem and is way better than not showing up at all.

[halejm]

I'm not holding my breath. I've been waiting for 2 years for this. I doubt this is even being worked on.

[Schwifty]

So I decided to try and test this: I have an Obsidian vault with 2k+ markdown notes in it.

I ran a script that changed all the extensions from '.md' to '.txt'. It took Dropbox about a minute to get synced up (seemingly correctly detecting that only the filename had changed, not the contents). Another minute later all of my notes were indexed and searchable.

Jup, that's how long it took: only a minute for the indexer to process 2000+ markdown/textfiles. And the **markdown-syntax** didn't pose any problems.

So why can't Dropbox add 'md' to the list of extensions that are indexed as plain text? I have no idea. Maybe there's some insane amount of markdown spread across all Dropbox accounts, and indexing all of it would be prohibitively expensive?

I hope I don't sound like a douchy PM, I'm just trying to understand the reasoning here. Would be nice if someone at Dropbox could provide some insight as to why this can't be done?

Of course I get that it won't be as easy as we outsiders imagine it to be.

But even then... could it be that much more than, say...

?

[Fred B.14]

I am a long time Onedrive user having now joined the Dropbox family. There is much to love about Dropbox.

However, with the ubiquitous use of Obsidian, Roam, and Logseq, the ability to full-text content search Markdown files (*.md files) is a must! Please add this feature soon.

In addition to full-text content index search for *.md, also include full-text content index search for *.csv (many application export functionality export to CSV, but not XLSX) files please.

Thank you!

[NashvilEric]

+1. Text files are the storage format of my life (why? https://sive.rs/plaintext), and Markdown is a ubiquitous way to add a bit of value to text.

Whether I store my life in dropbox or not depends on whether the search can index plain text markdown files.

[NashvilEric]

+1. Took a quick scan through this thread -- we are not asking for special support for a new file format. Instead, just count these as text.

I know some new features can turn into a slippery slope of related FRs. This doesn't look like that to me -- just index them during search as text files, because that is what they are.