How to Search Your Notes and Events in nocal

Use nocal's full-text search to find past meetings and notes fast. Learn what search covers and practical tips for tracking down a meeting from weeks ago.

nocal includes full-text search across both your notes and your calendar events, so the thing you half-remember from a meeting weeks ago is only a few keystrokes away. Because your notes and schedule live together, one search covers both.

  1. Open search in nocal (look for the search field, or use the search keyboard shortcut — see keyboard shortcuts).
  2. Type a word or phrase.
  3. Browse results, which include matching events and notes.
  4. Select a result to jump straight to that event and its note.

What search covers

SearchedExamples
Event detailsTitles, locations, attendees, descriptions
Note contentAnything you typed in a note, including markdown text

Search spans every connected account, so a query returns matches from your work and personal calendars together — see managing multiple calendars.

Tips for finding past meetings

  • Search by who, not when. If you don't remember the date, search an attendee's name to surface every meeting with them.
  • Use distinctive words. Project names, decisions, or unusual terms from your notes narrow results faster than common words.
  • Search the outcome. Looking for where a decision was made? Search a keyword from the decision itself — since notes are indexed, the right meeting surfaces even if the title was generic like "Sync."
  • Find action items. If you keep follow-ups as checklists, search the task wording to locate the note that owns it.

Search and organization work together

Search finds anything; folders and pins make the things you use most quick to reach without searching at all. Use folders for browsing a topic and pins for the notes you open daily, and lean on search for everything else.

Notes from disconnected accounts

Notes stay in nocal even after you disconnect a calendar account, so you can still search and read them. Their original events may no longer be synced, but the note content remains findable.

Let AI help you search and summarize

With nocal's MCP server, AI assistants like Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and VS Code can read your notes to answer questions or summarize past meetings on your behalf. See the MCP overview and connect agents.