Commenting to signal-boost.

This feature has been requested a few times as far as I've seen (2017: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/290260, 2018: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/73079/feature-request-search-for-folder-name, 2020: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/86177/feature-request-search-library-for-collections) and advice has been given that it's planned, but there's no ETA. And as far as I know it hasn't been implemented.

I presume it's wiser for us to presume that it's not going to happen. But if there's a way to support it happening / increase the likelihood of it happening please advise. I presume there's still no ETA, but if possible it would be good to know if it's next on the list, or what other features are ahead of it in the queue.

Perhaps if everyone who wants this feature adds a comment to this post that would help by demonstrating how much demand there is for it, compared to the other requested features?

Happy to be instructed on the correct approach to advocating for features if this isn't it. And to be clear, my intention is to request humbly, not demand.

Thanks for considering my comment. :)

I think it's the same as any other use-case for search as opposed to filtering by the start of something / having the correct sequence. It would be helpful to be able to find all instances of collections and/or sub-collections that have a particular term in the their name / particular terms, regardless of where in the name the term is.

The terms by which I group a set of items isn't always those that are used in their content or metadata. So I add them to a collection / sub-collection in order to group them together in a way that makes sense for me. My understanding is that's the intended use of collections and sub-collections. But I can't always remember the order in which I put the terms in the collection / sub-collection's name, so the limited existing facility isn't a reliable solution to me finding an existing collection / sub-collection I've started on something, or confirming if I have started one.

And even if I can remember the order of the terms in the name, I can't always remember the collection that I put a sub-collection in, so if I have to use the limited existing facility I would have to expand each collection and check each one until I found it, and if I wanted to check if that was the only place I had created such a sub-collection I'd have to check all of them.

Given the previous communications that the feature is planned, I presume there's acceptance of the validity of the use-case / desire for the feature. What isn't clear to me is the priority placed on building it compared to the other planned additions / improvements.

As to how such a search feature might look to the user, it could be similar to the search field for tags (which does find text embedded within tags); except at the top of the collections pane. It could either limit the displayed list to collections satisfying the search term, or it could just highlight those collections that do (similar to the display when pressing Ctrl to show which collections an item belongs to).

I would like to very kindly and humbly ask for the search folder capability. In my personal priority scale, it is at first place.