[whpalmer4]

The smart matching code is one of my favorite features in OmniFocus!

If you bring up the action editor, tap the Info button, you get the choosers for context and project. Tap on one, and you'll get a list of all of the projects or contexts in your database, with a search field at the top. If you type a letter into the search field, the list will be narrowed down to only the ones containing that letter. Type another letter, and the list narrows down to only the ones containing both letters, in that order, but not necessarily adjacent. Type a third letter, and as long as you aren't picking out common letters that appear in all of your project or context names, your target is probably in view by now. It also underlines the matching letters in each listed item, so you can get an idea of whether a different set of letters would branch out more efficiently. I find that just using the first letter of most of the words usually gets me there right away. I've got a folder called OmniGroup with a handful of projects, such as Omni Group Forums, Omni bug reporting, etc. Typing "ogf" gets me the forum project, "oobr" gets the bug reporting project. Once my target is in view I just tap on it and I'm done.

Note that the "spotlight" search (magnifying glass at upper right) does not do this sort of matching. It would probably be prohibitively slow with the much larger number of strings to search (every action name in addition to every project name). The first character takes about 10 seconds for a response when searching through 8000 choices in my database, though subsequent ones are very rapid as the list quickly shrinks. It would be even more painful if it did the smart matching, I'm sure, and possibly only slightly more useful.