Use search or find for multiple words?
 

Is there a way I can use the sidebar "Search" command - or the Find command - to search for items with multiple, non-contiguous terms?

In other words, I'd like to find an item in which the words Nashville and Martian appear. Not the phrase, but two unconnected words.

Any way to do this? It would make Search MUCH more useful.

You can do this using the Find option with Regular Expression (the other find type option at the top of the Find window). For your example you would search for "Nashville(.*)Martian".

Awesome. Just tried it, and it works great.

I never would have found that on my own. Excuse my ignorance, but what is "Regular Expression"? Are there other things we ought to know about using it with OO?

It's a method of specifying search patterns. This is a good [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression"]overview[/URL] of it. You can also just google for the general idea you're trying to express and often find examples of it.

Thanks. Just started doing that.

In experimenting, I discovered two new things about this trick:

1) It is case-sensitive
2) phrases must be enclosed by parens, not quotes

One limitation is that it shows one result at a time. It would be great if Regular Expression searches were an option in the Sidebar Find function, so that all the hits would be displayed in the sidebar. Any chance of that happening?

There's no current plans to add regex searching to batch find but I've added your request.