Searching for second word in collection names

franz47
I have several collections whose names consist of two or more words. Searching for the second word in a collection by typing it when "My library" is highlighted never gives these second words as a result. It just yields collections starting with a similar letter combination in the first word. Also searching in the search field for "Everything" does not yield these second words of collections. Is there any way to search for collections by another than the first sequence of letters in the first word?
  • dstillman
    Not currently, sorry.
  • franz47
    That turns out to be a larger drawback more and more the bigger the number of collections grows. Many of them have two separated words as their name and I cannot recall everything any more by heart. So I was relying on the search mechanisms to find every separate word until I realized that this is not the case.

    Would that be a big job to incorporate this search method by separate words in one of the next versions?
  • realtime99
    My testing suggests that you can solve this problem by using '.' between the words in the collection names rather than a space.
  • franz47
    Tried it out, did not work.
  • dstillman
    I think realtime99 just meant that you can use a period instead of a space if you want to be able to type the whole name (including the first word) without the search stopping at the space. If I understood you, you want to be able to just type the second word to match on that.

    The find-as-you-type functionality comes for free from the Mozilla platform we use — it's the same behavior you see, for example, in the Firefox bookmarks manager — and isn't something we can easily customize in the current version. But I'm not sure FAYT is really the right solution for this — I think using FAYT to find a second word would be a bit strange. We're hoping to add some other sort of collection search that you could use in this case, though.

    For what it's worth, as you may have discovered, you can navigate between items that begin with the same word by just typing the word again. E.g., if you have collections "foo bar" and "foo qux", you could type "foo" to select "foo bar", wait a second, and then type "foo" again to select "foo qux", even if there was another collection beginning with "f" in between.
  • realtime99
    Yes, I meant if you have collections "United Kingdom" and "United States" and change them to "United.Kingdom" and "United.States", then typing "United.S" will select "United.States".
  • franz47
    That still needs the beginning of the collection name and works also now with the blank between the words. I would like to search e.g. for "Kingdom" and retrieve every colletcion containing this word, e.g. "United Kingdom". I was sort of expecting that mechanism since this way searches work in the Windows Explorer, which also retreives letter sequences from within filenames.
  • realtime99
    Sorry, I did misunderstand. If you have so many collections that you can't very easily find the one you want, have you considered using tags rather than collections to mark groups of items?
  • franz47
    That will work, I presume, but it would need an extra work step and probably better planning of the tags than the visible names of collections
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