I had this problem as well, a lot. I think it only goes away with a hardware upgrade to silicon. My i7 would be perfectly functional and fast, in theory.
Which search are you using? If you use the Command Bar (CMD+J) and start typing the note title, it should appear fast. Sounds like you are using the search function which searches inside notes (top left in the sidebar of NotePlan)?
Eduard Metzger: Ah, I didn't know that. Yes, the Command Bar is very fast and will work just fine. Time for me to buy the app. Thanks!
Eduard Metzger: I appear to have run into a similar problem with the "Review" option. It must also search inside the notes because it is taking 52 seconds for results to appear on a new MacBook with 3,000 notes. Is there a way to limit the search to a single folder where I can move all my ToDo files? Everything else about NotePlan is first rate, but for someone with a lot of notes, the review and textual search feels like the the low-memory 1970s. Hopefully there is another option for this situation as well. Thanks!
Michael: Review is indeed searching every single note by opening it and hence slow. But it's using a single CPU core I think. Multi-threading it so it uses multiple cores would 4x the speed, but also use that much of your resources. Another approach might be to cache the notes in parallel in a database structure. Will experiment with this eventually.
Eduard Metzger: Thanks, I appreciate that. As an alternate example, nvALT (https://github.com/ttscoff/nv) filters/searches my 3K notes instantly as I type. Don't know the algorithm, but it's open source and may be worth a look.
Michael: I‘ll first check if there are any obvious tweaks I can do in the code. But long term the plan is to save the contents of the notes in a database locally (additionally to the file itself), which should be far more efficient in searching.
Do other people also have performance Problems with searching? This would impact me in my transition to noteplan. I will have thousands of notes too.