Approximate search

Approximate Search in Freeplane

Starting with 1.2.x, Freeplane includes an 'approximate Search' feature which allows to find content (nodes, notes, or whatever) that do not exactly match the search term, but allow some changes ("distance") between the search term and the content.

How to run (approximate) Search

Press Ctrl-F or select View->Toolbars->Filter toolbar to show the "filter/search" toolbar and enable Approximate searching by enabling the "Approximate" checkbox in the filter toolbar (Alt+A). Then you can enter a search term in the search box () and press Enter or click the "Find next" Button (icon with a blue right arrow in the filter toolbar) to start the search. If you want to check for equality (search term equals content as opposed to is contained in content), then you should change the default "Contains" in the search type combobox to "Is equal to". You can define more complex search rules by using the Filter->Compose filter dialog.

Once you activate Approximate matching, all matching using the filter tool is done approximately, i.e.

• you can search for "file" and it will find "flie" (typo)
• you can search for "hobbies" and it will find "hobbys"
• if you use Freeplane for program source code: you can search for "NumberFormat" and it will find "aNumber_Format"
• "network" = "netzwerk"
• ...

Configuring the threshold

Matching is done based on edit distance (Damerau-Levenshtein algorithm), that is a match beween search term x and content y is considered a hit (true positive) if the

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