Quick Capture
Cmd+K, term, Enter — two keystrokes to the hit
- You open Quick Capture from anywhere with Cmd+K and land on the hit in under two seconds. ·· Success criterion: You find five given notes, each in under three seconds.
- You narrow hits with inline property filters (type:meeting, jahr:2026). ·· Success criterion: You frame three filter searches correctly and hit the expected subset.
- You know when two keystrokes are enough and when arrow-down is needed. ·· Success criterion: You explain why recall @ position 1 = 87% can mean three keystrokes instead of two.
Cmd+K, term, Enter — block or page, in two keystrokes. The same search in the file explorer takes eight: open the window, click into the search box, choose the folder scope, type the filename, wait, open the file, search for the term within the file, hit. mium shortens this chain to one keyboard shortcut and one search term.
Why tool search slows you down
Across 200 search sessions in a beta corpus of 1,200 pages, the search-to-hit time in the file explorer averaged 14 seconds. Of that, 6 seconds go to the tab switch, 4 to narrowing the folder, 4 to opening and scrolling the matched file. Block-level hits — a paragraph inside a wiki page, say — stay out of reach for the file explorer by design, because its granularity stops at the file.
5 rules for Quick Capture
- Cmd+K (on Linux and Windows, Ctrl+K) is the only entry point into search. No second input field in the sidebar, no toolbar magnifier.
- Full-text across everything — title, body, properties, comments. No opt-in switches.
- Block and page hits are shown together, with the block position as a sub-line under the page title.
- Recently opened pages appear at the top the moment the search box is empty (recency bias as the default, not as a plugin).
- You type property filters inline — type:meeting, autor:team-mut, jahr:2026, with no dialogue box and no builder.
Before and after — file-explorer search vs. Cmd+K
| Step | File explorer | Cmd+K in mium |
|---|---|---|
| Entry | switch window, click into the search box | Cmd+K |
| Input | type the filename | type the term |
| Granularity | file | block or page |
| Property filter | not available | inline (autor:, type:) |
| Keystrokes to hit | 8 | 2 |
| Search to hit (median) | 14 sec | 1.2 sec |
An honest question
How long do you take to find a note from three months ago? Not in the best case, but at the median across your last ten attempts. The answer decides whether Quick Capture is a comfort feature for you, or the precondition for the note still existing at all.
- Open mium, press Cmd+K and find five notes from the last few weeks, each in under three seconds — type the term, pick the hit, move on. When a hit is not at the top, practise the move arrow-down plus Enter till it is second nature. Then frame two inline property filters such as type:meeting and jahr:2026 and check that the hit list shrinks to the expected subset.⏱ 5 min
💡 Deliberately search for a term that occurs in several notes — then you see how block and page hits show up together and how the property filter narrows the list.
Model answer: In four of five searches the hit is at position 1, so the term and Enter are enough — two keystrokes. On the fifth, arrow-down nudges the focus one line lower, then Enter, three keystrokes. The filter type:meeting jahr:2026 turns the free search into a query and shows only the blocks that carry both properties — searching becomes finding.
How many keystrokes to the hit when it is at position 1?
Two keys to the thought.
Don't search — find. Your second brain brings back what you were thinking yesterday; a partner that thinks along, not a filing cabinet.
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