Search in handwriting
⌘Space, and the note turns up.
A handwritten note stops being a picture. It goes into the same macOS search as the rest of your files — found by what’s written in it, not by its name. The result opens the document itself in your library, not a copy.
The handwriting is read by one of the recognition engines — the one you chose.
plain Spotlight, no window of our own
How it works
Plain ⌘Space, not a window of our own
nothing new to learn
The same search
Words from your notes go into the macOS index. Notes show up beside your other files, in the same list.
A result opens the document
Not a copy and not an export — the document itself in your library, like any other file on disk.
The “Search Slate Drive” scope works
Just as for any folder: every entry knows its own path on disk.
The engine you chose does the reading
Notes go to the handwriting engine, annotated PDFs to the print one. Which is which you set on the handwriting page. Engines →
What gets indexed
Notes yes, books no
and that’s on purpose
Notebooks
defaultTheir pages exist only as strokes: without recognition there are no words at all. The one kind that is on from the start.
PDFs you wrote on
optionalThe margins and the marker cover words the file doesn’t contain. The whole page has to be read, which is why this is a switch of its own.
Plain PDFs and EPUBs
neverThey already carry their own text. Recognizing it would mean a worse copy of something already correct.
Private folders
your callThe “Choose…” button opens your library as a tree with a switch on every row: what you mark is never read. A folder covers everything inside it too.
Progress
The card shows what has been read
The first pass over a large library takes a while. The card in settings shows how many documents were read, how many are left and how many failed — by name, not as a single number. Failures stay in the count.
On battery or when the Mac runs hot, indexing waits. A separate window lists the documents that were read and the engine that read them.
FAQ
Questions about search
- Is this a separate search or plain ⌘Space?
- Plain. The words go into the macOS index, and the “Search Slate Drive” scope works as it does for any folder. The app has no window of its own.
- Are books indexed?
- No — PDFs and EPUBs already have text. The exception is PDFs you wrote on: that’s a switch of its own.
- What about battery power?
- Indexing waits. In Low Power Mode and when the Mac runs hot it stops, then carries on once conditions are back to normal.
- Can I exclude a folder?
- Yes, every folder has its own switch. Nothing is read from an excluded one and nothing of it reaches Spotlight.
- What if I turn indexing off?
- Notes drop out of ⌘Space, while file names are still searchable. What was read stays in the cache — switching it back on doesn’t mean starting over.