FYI, my response was not to argue against or downplay the utility of this Feature Request, but just to offer you a simple way to solve the conundrum that you had described in your comment above.
With only three vault items to compare, simply use a notepad and a pencil to jot down the relevant timestamps — or use the browser extension pop-out to create three pop-out windows that you can line up side-by-side.
I realise that - however the confusion was being unable to differentiate the two entries. I’ve since realised after an incorrect auto-fill that what happened was that BW had saved the updated password as a new entry using the site form’s real name rather than my username, and I’d edited that to correct it, not realising that a new entry had been created, so of course now there were two “identical” entries, save for the timestamps. This is why having them displayed up front would help so much.
@grb yes understood and I appreciate the suggestion as I wondered if there were any other methods. However I had to giggle at the suggestion to “simply use a notepad and a pencil” - in this day and age!! Heck, why don’t I just keep it really simple and write down the password and stick it on my monitor??
That said I hadn’t noticed the extension’s pop-out function before. It works in a slightly strange way in that you have to pop it out first and then repeat the domain search each time but it does help, not least since the window is slightly larger than normal so one doesn’t have to scroll up and down to view the timestamps. Or hunt down my notepad and pencil.
But it’s all still way too complicated for my mother so she’ll just stick with using the same root password for unimportant sites or even shun registering entirely if that’s an option since the added-value seems minimal if not negative. I look forward to the day that I can recommend her a Password Manager that makes the whole process simple.
@MrB … some adding suggestions for situations like that:
Instead of paper and pencil, you could have copied all passwords/usernames/etc. in one entry, e.g. in the note section, and check one by one if this was the right credential…
And I would suggest, to turn off the “auto-save”. First creating a vault item with a freely chosen title, your email/username (the latter possibly generated), password (newly generated), URIs - and after that (or side-by-side) you can create your account with LG or whatever, with your already created and stored entry data. Then you don’t have to rely on the automatic process and can be sure, you already stored your password… That routine has never failed me so far.
I do know that LastPass has this functionality built in and it is very handy to have, which is why I am disappointed that Bitwarden doesn’t seem to think it is a worthy feature. I was a longtime LastPass user but security threats and the expiration of my lifetime premium membership caused me to seek an alternative password manager.
To those at Bitwarden who continue to see this as a unimportant feature, the ability to sort my password list on things like recent changes, date created, etc. is useful to get around certain limitations of all password managers, where temporary notepad files are being used to hold a generated password.
If creating a large number of services on a new server for example, sometimes I need to check if I did save the password stored in the temp file before deleting off my system. Trying to pick individual entries out by name, out of a list of hundreds of entries, to see if it exists and if it has the generated password is time consuming. Sorting by creation date speeds this up a lot.
As I also cannot seem to search for a specific password, or subcomponent of it through the search feature, the ability to sort by creation date becomes necessary.
The security issues at LastPass were a serious cause for concern which is why I left. However they did manage to build a fairly robust user experience to their interface. I think Bitwarden has a lot of great potential to it, but the interface does need some polishing.
So one of the suggestions is the autosave functionality. Yes the password generator has a history of generated passwords, but then you also have to remember the order in which you installed and created various services.
Some people who have experience with software or services that do not allow passwords to start with special characters and numbers tend to only use passwords that begin with upper or lower case letters. When the generator provides those passwords that violate that rule, those users will autogenerate another password. Sometimes this is something that needs to be done several times before an acceptable password is found. All these entries are also stored in the password history.
Even though the password generator history is a very useful feature, there are still instances where one still needs to sort the password list by creation date to help find entries out of a large number of credentials. So this is not a suitable solution on its own.
I imagine most of those involved in developing Bitwarden and providing feedback to help other users are not over the age of say 40. I had an pretty good recall ability, unfortunately time is the great equalizer and eventually additional tools are needed to help us “older folks”
Well, it’s nearly three years later. How’s it going?
My employer is finally starting to get onboard with the concept of Password Managers and I’ve been hoping to recommend BW.
I’ve also been working on getting my siblings and other family members to the point where I’m about to recommend a few password managers, but BW is not one of them.
Even Norton’s (let’s face it… crappy) PWM has a limited sort function (newest to oldest) and for that reason alone it still outshines BW.
When, oh when, will Bitwarden develop this basic function?
Asking for family, friends, employers…
because of the lack of categorization of vault items, and the limitation of the sort results. I feel that I click and sift through my list many times before I can find the item that I wanted to edit. Many times I used a number or special character to prefix a vault item hoping this would help me to minimize the search result and sort based on my criteria, which is not working. If I prefix a list item with a *-, the search result will not even show it.
Apples new password app has sort by latest use/edit which is really nice. I use many platforms, so i don’t want to rely on it and would prefer Bitwarden.
It may not be an easy item to implement but we’ve been asking for this literally for years.
I just stumbled in here as I imported a delta of my recent experiment with keepassXC and wanted to see if every new entry was imported correctly and couldn’t find a sort function or a search term like a “SortByNewestASC” would be fine for me. Now I will have to search for 24 account infos imported and see if they are correct.
Nice work you did there, keeping a simple feature request like this open for 6 years. Like the App, support the project since start, but come on, guys and gals, really? Mother of base of basic functionality…
@billsolomon I have merged your topic into this existing Feature Request thread. Don’t forget to click the Vote button at the top of the thread if you support this request.
You can absolutely add special characters to your vault item names to help with searching, as long as you stay away from those characters that have specialsignificance in the advanced search syntax (e.g., +, -, >, and *). If you provide a specific example, I can try to give additional pointers for how to make your prefix scheme work (however, if you are going to take me up on this offer, I would suggest doing so by posting a new topic in the Ask the Community section of the forum).