Search not working unless I comment out try block

[glortho]

Every search I performed would show that it was searching keyword index (0.23.4), but it would just go away errorlessly after a few seconds yielding no results, even when searching for tags or other keywords that I could see existed in the index.pickle and tags.txt files.

Commenting out the try block in autoload/xolox/notes.vim#search solved the problem, however. Surely it's not a good idea to keep it this way. How can I assist in the resolution of this?

Awesome plugin otherwise!

[nzbart]

Search seems to be failing for me, too. I am running on Windows.

When I run ":SearchNotes posit", I see that python is launched. However, in Vim, I get "notes.vim 0.023.4: No matches"

When I run the same python command line, I get the following output:

C:\Users\Bart\vimfiles\bundle\notes\autoload\xolox [(unknown)]> python  "C:\Users\Bart\vimfiles\bundle\notes\misc\notes\search-notes.py" "--database" "C:\Users\Bart\vimfiles\bundle\notes\misc\notes\index.pickle" "--ignore-case" "--notes" C:\Users\Bart\vimfiles\bundle\notes\misc\notes\user" "posit"
Found 1 notes in C:\Users\Bart\vimfiles\bundle\notes\misc\notes\user ..
Python works fine!
C:\Users\Bart\vimfiles\bundle\notes\misc\notes\user\test

[nzbart]

jedverity, it sounds like you have a workaround. I couldn't see the workaround in your vim-notes fork - are you able to push it up?

[glortho]

Here's the commit – glortho@6c49d36 – or you can just use this fork, though it's a bad and temporary fix for sure! https://github.com/jedverity/vim-notes/tree/search-fix

[nzbart]

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to fix the problem for me. Back to the drawing board - but thanks for taking the time to push your fix up!

Note: I get identical behaviour on Debian testing.

[gglanzani]

This fixes it for me though! Thanks @jedverity

[svenXY]

works for me too, thanks

[svenXY]

Can this be pulled please?

[xolox]

Can one of you run the Vim command :verbose SearchNotes whatever, capture the verbose messages emitted by my plug-ins and post those messages here? Please run the command twice:

1. With a keyword that you know should produce matches,
2. with a keyword that definitely won't produce matches.

Hopefully the verbose messages will tell me / us what is going wrong here. Thanks!

[svenXY]

existing keyword:

notes.vim 0.23.7: Searching notes using keyword index ..
notes.vim 0.23.7: Executing external command python2 '/home/svh/.vim/bundle/vim-notes/misc/notes/search-notes.py' '--database' '/home/svh/.vim/bundle/vim-notes/misc/notes/index.pickle' '--ignore-case' '--notes' '/home/svh/ownCloud/notes'
 '@pacman'
im 'runtimepath' nicht gefunden: "autoload/xolox/shell.vim"
vim-misc 1.8.5: Generated shell expression: (python2 '/home/svh/.vim/bundle/vim-notes/misc/notes/search-notes.py' '--database' '/home/svh/.vim/bundle/vim-notes/misc/notes/index.pickle' '--ignore-case' '--notes' '/home/svh/ownCloud/notes'
 '@pacman') 1>'/tmp/vLrtfx9/39' 2>'/tmp/vLrtfx9/40'
vim-misc 1.8.5: Executing external command using system() function: sh -c '(python2 '\''/home/svh/.vim/bundle/vim-notes/misc/notes/search-notes.py'\'' '\''--database'\'' '\''/home/svh/.vim/bundle/vim-notes/misc/notes/index.pickle'\'' '\'
'--ignore-case'\'' '\''--notes'\'' '\''/home/svh/ownCloud/notes'\'' '\''@pacman'\'') 1>'\''/tmp/vLrtfx9/39'\'' 2>'\''/tmp/vLrtfx9/40'\'''
notes.vim 0.23.7: Search script output (raw): ['Python works fine!', '/home/svh/ownCloud/notes/pacman']
notes.vim 0.23.7: Search script output (processed): ['/home/svh/ownCloud/notes/pacman']
notes.vim 0.23.7: Search script reported 1 matching note.
notes.vim 0.23.7: Populated quick-fix window in 0.00029 seconds.
notes.vim 0.23.7: Searched notes in 0.063 seconds.

Non-existing keyword:

notes.vim 0.23.7: Searching notes using keyword index ..
notes.vim 0.23.7: Executing external command python2 '/home/svh/.vim/bundle/vim-notes/misc/notes/search-notes.py' '--database' '/home/svh/.vim/bundle/vim-notes/misc/notes/index.pickle' '--ignore-case' '--notes' '/home/svh/ownCloud/notes'
 'xxxRRRBBBJJUJ'
im 'runtimepath' nicht gefunden: "autoload/xolox/shell.vim"
vim-misc 1.8.5: Generated shell expression: (python2 '/home/svh/.vim/bundle/vim-notes/misc/notes/search-notes.py' '--database' '/home/svh/.vim/bundle/vim-notes/misc/notes/index.pickle' '--ignore-case' '--notes' '/home/svh/ownCloud/notes'
 'xxxRRRBBBJJUJ') 1>'/tmp/vLrtfx9/42' 2>'/tmp/vLrtfx9/43'
vim-misc 1.8.5: Executing external command using system() function: sh -c '(python2 '\''/home/svh/.vim/bundle/vim-notes/misc/notes/search-notes.py'\'' '\''--database'\'' '\''/home/svh/.vim/bundle/vim-notes/misc/notes/index.pickle'\'' '\'
'--ignore-case'\'' '\''--notes'\'' '\''/home/svh/ownCloud/notes'\'' '\''xxxRRRBBBJJUJ'\'') 1>'\''/tmp/vLrtfx9/42'\'' 2>'\''/tmp/vLrtfx9/43'\'''
notes.vim 0.23.7: Search script output (raw): ['Python works fine!']
notes.vim 0.23.7: Search script output (processed): []
notes.vim 0.23.7: Search script reported 0 matching notes.
notes.vim 0.23.7: No matches
notes.vim 0.23.7: Searched notes in 0.063 seconds.

From the error message, I assume something with loading autoload/xolox/shell.vim fails, in fact, I don't have it at all.

I'm using Vundle here.

Does that help you?

Thanks for picking it up,
Sven

[svenXY]

OK, installing xolox/vim-shell fixed it for me. If it is required, you should probably add this to README.md in vim-notes.

Cheers,
Sven

[xolox]

Hey Sven,

The dependency on vim-shell is supposed to be optional. Thanks for the feedback. Now I have something concrete to look into. Will (hopefully) report back here soon.

[xolox]

@svenXY: Going by the first fragment you posted it seems like everything works fine... I suppose that despite these messages:

notes.vim 0.23.7: Search script reported 1 matching note.
notes.vim 0.23.7: Populated quick-fix window in 0.00029 seconds.
notes.vim 0.23.7: Searched notes in 0.063 seconds.

It really doesn't work? (just trying to make sure I understand the full situation).

[svenXY]

Correct, it does seem to find something, but then does not populate quickfix (it seems to keep the old quickfix instead, but I'm not sure about that)

[xolox]

Long story short: I just pushed a small change to GitHub which includes some additional logging. Can someone who can reproduce the problem rerun the two tests I previously asked for with this 'new version' of the vim-notes plug-in?

---

Now for the long story:

I thought this might be a problem with Windows support but judging by the pathnames in the vim-notes output quoted by @svenXY he appears to be running UNIX so that rules that out. Then I thought it might be a problem with case sensitivity, because search-notes.py finds something but then :vimgrep loses the search results. However try as I might I can't reproduce it. Then I thought of something else, which requires a bit of explaining:

• The plug-in works by first using the Python script to perform a keyword search in the index. The Python script just reports filenames of matching files.
• The plug-in takes these filenames and runs :vimgrep on them to populate the quick-fix window (because doing this programatically appeared to be a non trivial undertaking).

I can see the potential for inconsistent behavior here when the keyword search in the Python script and the :vimgrep command don't agree about which files match. It could cause the behavior reported here.

Assuming this hypothesis is correct, the next useful question to ask is why all of you are consistently hitting this inconsistency (no pun intended ;-) while this has never happened for me. I can think of a couple of reasons, all having to do with how a keyword search is translated into a Vim regular expression pattern by the vim-notes plug-in. Hence the opening question :-).