I like how I can enter a folder and search inside it without querying the entire vault, BUT… It would be VERY helpful if we had the option to search within all the subfolders of that folder.
If you have a very structured folder organization, then your most liable choices of retrieving a password are by either searching the entire vault (therefore the folder organization is rendered completely useless), or going manually through many subfolders until you reach the one you need (which is very tedious if you have a very structured organization).
The issue becomes even more evident if you have many accounts for a single platform and you don’t want to individually name them different, or the naming is just not helpful to differentiate them.
The feature request from here seems to go hand in hand with this.
Thank you for this request! Just a note - the reason why it doesn’t search ‘sub’ folders is due to them not being actual parent-child folders. They’re just displayed for ease of navigation but do not contain any other relationship.
Yes, I figured as much given the way you have to create them. I believe LastPass is doing something similar as well, but they don’t have the “folder specific” search which Bitwarden does. So while that is available, I think it could be quite a strong feature to implement the option to search in subfolders as well.
I can’t talk much about how the search is implemented, but using a very simplistic way of looking at it, this could maybe be solved by implementing a search for folders, which then looks up every folder that starts with the exact same name as the current folder (unless it is the root folder) and is followed by a “/” to find any subfolders and then search in each of them. I believe part of this is already implemented when combining the folders into parent and children to display them as subfolders.
One possible Issue I can see with this is that we are allowed to create multiple folders with the same name, and from what I see, the first created folder is also the first one that is considered that the subfolders are belonging to (although if used the same algorithm it should have more or less the same result when searching).
Another Issue I can see is that we are allowed to end a folder name in “/”, even if it’s not shown until you edit its name. But the algorithm seems to ignore it for subfolders as well. For example if I create folder “a/” and then I create folder “a//b”, and I already have a folder named “a”, the folder “a//b” will be grouped under the folder “a”, not “a/”. Probably because “a” is “alphabetically” before “a/”.
My use case is where I click in a related parent folder, say “Finance”, perform a search, and expect to find results from, say, a sub-folder named “Investing”. In this scenario, search is unable to locate the expected item due to its assignment to the sub-folder. The only solution is to directly click on the sub-folder containing the item (if one’s memory serves correctly) or click on “My vault”, and perform the search again.
I’m hopeful that this request will be addressed soon.
