Note: The post below was “hidden” because someone in the community “flagged it as inappropriate, offensive, abusive or a violation of community guidelines”. But, after re-reading it, and considering how I might revise it, I am not sure what to change. It is impassioned, I’ll admit. I really care about the tools I use, about security, and usability, and I love Bitwarden, other than this one bug that we are all discussing. And I am frustrated, yes, but I don’t think I was inappropriate, or offensive, or abusive, or in violation of any guidelines. So I’m reposting it, as is, so that the policy can run its course, and whoever felt so offended, abused or violated by my post can flag it again, and “if the post is hidden again by the community a second time it […] will be handled by staff”. What do you think?
50 months, 52 votes, and over 70 comments later – all from users basically begging for this feature that most don’t know Bitwarden actually has… many of us saying that we feel so frustrated by this non-intuitive search limitation they we feel like going back to Lastpasss over it, and Lastpass search still Just Works, while the devs here can’t fathom how new Bitwarden users, especially us Lastpass refugees, don’t know that we just have to type:
as @dh024 pedantically explains:
>notes:*[email protected]*
Really? how are users supposed to know that?
I’m sorry. I switched from Lastpass to Bitwarden months ago, and just assumed that the notes field was entirely UNSEARCHABLE. Why? because I only ever search for partial account numbers in that field, usually the last four digits, and so Bitwarden instantly searches my thousands of items and displays exactly nothing.
How is a new user supposed to know they have to enter wildcards to do a partial-word search? Simple substring matching is the default user-expected behavior in every other software application. Press Ctrl-F (or Cmd-F) right now… in your browser… then type just the letter “e”. What happens? Simple Substring Matching! Is that so hard to deliver to your adoring legions of users??
The Bitwarden search box puts the cart instead of the horse: it has made “advanced search” the default (with its cryptic, mysterious syntax (that only a programmer could love (and then didn’t even tell those of us users who are programmers!))) and in the process has made (what the entire rest of the software industry calls) “basic search” simply impossible.
Here’s a suggestion:
If you want Bitwarden to keep all of us users who switched to Bitwarden from Lastpass, make the search do partial matching of the full text of the Notes field by default and make your clever, magic mystery meat kick in …only when we press – oh, i don’t know, how about a button labeled “Advanced Search”? Maybe with some little docu-popup explaining how it works? You know, right there in the user interface, instead of burying it in the docs?
OR at least…
when a basic, simple text search returns nothing… maybe display a link to the docs, so newbies like me (a 20 year web developer) can get a clue… some small inkling even, that you’ve chosen to hide this feature so well, by including some convenient helpful message like:
Your simple text substring search returned zero results.
Didn’t find what you’re looking for?
Try enclosing your search terms inside *Wildcard*Asterisks* (so we can actually find them!) You mean you haven’t already read all about out super-secret search syntax, way down at the bottom of our amazing “Search your Vault” documentation page, barely mentioned (and even then, not showing the most common, simple search-all-fields use case) in a section tantalizingly titled Wildcards and Advanced Search Parameters?? Oh, you’re not a programmer who even knows what the world “wildcard” means in terms of computer text matching? Well, shame on you, then!
In addition to the 70+ comments above I see 4 other requests that were identical, or very similar to this one:
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Feature request #19004: Search does not find any word in Notes, if the word ends with a symbol eg ‘,’ or ‘.’ - this poor guy thinks it’s the commas between his “tags” that make his searches not be found, but it’s that he (somehow! 
) doesn’t know that he just needs to surround his tags with asterisks…
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Feature request #29089 Search All Fields, including Most Especially Notes, by Default “LastPass has this capability and that’s the one area where it surpasses Bitwarden” [closed with link to the docs]
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Feature request #28774 Search notes field [closed with link to the docs]
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Feature request #29587 Search functions implements “as Lastpass already does” [closed with link to the docs]
so @bw-admin consider this a request to reopen those 3 that were closed, and merge them all with this request (and combine the votes, and add-back the votes of the closed ones to this one – let’s see if we can hit 100!! shall we?)
Finally, Again: A plea For Simple Search Sanity: I search for partial number matches in my notes a dozen times a day. Please make simple substring matches simply work. The way they work in Lastpass, in Chrome, in Notepad, in VS Code. …in this very test box that I am typing in right now, on your website, y’know?
Delight your users! Don’t make me think, search, scour your site for the arcane flavor of regular expression syntax that you invented just for the occasion of frustrating me, and have to spend all night explaining why I’m asking for it!
And, if you simply can’t make your programmers make it Just Work… then by all means, go around them! Ask your UX designers not to be complicit in hiding this simple feature so well! Have them add a clue, a suggestion, some docs or links – throw new users a bone fer cryin out loud – put something in that Big, Sad, Desperate & Empty NOT-FOUND space, right there under the search box, that your users have to stare at, when the great default-advanced search engine came up empty-handed, telling us why, and how we can maybe then jump thru whatever hoops you’ve placed in our path to just doing a normal search…
thanks,
-dave
