Because I’d changed the timeline of my WIP, I needed to locate all instances of the word “days.” I searched like this:
The problem was that unbeknownst to me, and despite plenty of room, the number of results was limited to ten. As a result, I failed to find some important references. I know that I can use the full search, but consider allowing more than ten results. The Quick Search has some advantages.
Thanks.
The whole point of Quick Search is that it’s quick and simple. It’s really intended to help find single documents. Finding every instance of a word (or place, or character) in your manuscript is inherently a Project Search task.
Katherine
I’m sorry if I get fed up with these excuses.
Quick search can be extremely valuable for displaying more than 10 results. As an example, I’d changed the timeline, and I wanted to get a quick look at all the instances of sentences referring to the days after an event.
But that’s not the point. The point is that it did not specify that the results had been cut off. That was the same as saying “These are the only ten results.” If you don’t want to display all of the the result even though there’s plenty of room, you need a line that says something to the effect of “<There may be more results that aren’t shown.>”
This is a wish list forum, not a bug report forum. When you’re requesting feedback or a suggestions, don’t give excuses.
How is that an excuse? Kewms explained how the feature is intended to work and pointed you to one that will do what you want. You can suggest a change to a feature, but the developer is no way obligated to change it just because you don’t like how it works. There really is no call to be so hostile.
Don’t confuse an excuse with a response.
You posted your feedback based on your expectations. Katherine responded to explain how your expectations do not match the developer’s expectations and vision of how this feature works, so that you can adjust your expectations accordingly and be less frustrated in the future by selecting the correct tool that will work most closely to your expectations – no need to change the program and wait for some nebulous “some day” when what you want to do, with just a slight change in your expectations, can be done now.
@Trombone Al, I get that you found Quick Search results to be misleading. I also find them to be misleading. Net result: I took Quick Search off my toolbar. There are other ways to do everything that it provides, and toolbar real estate is a limited resource.
To clarify, by quoting from the user manual:
So in that case, with a tool designed to work more like Spotlight or a URL bar, the notion isn’t to produce an exhaustive list of every possible matching item in a project, but to create as best as possible a list of top results based on what you have typed, refining that list of results until you get to a point where you can easily navigate using the tool.
It’s not so much about searching, broadly, as it is doing stuff with the one thing you want to look up quickly.
Extending the number of potential hits from 10 to whatever (20?) isn’t going to solve the underlying problem with trying to use the tool in a manner that is objectively incorrect: to create exhaustive lists. The problem then merely becomes, “I didn’t realise it only showed 20”.
So this would be a better route I think. However, to my mind the command option at the bottom that says, “Full project search” is pretty clear that this isn’t a full search, and that if you want a full search you should click there. It feels a bit wordy to me to say on top of that, that the results in the list may not be full. Maybe I’m wrong though.
You know, if you do that you can still use it via the shortcut—and in that case it works a lot like Spotlight does. 
But I’m curious to know how you do what it does with other tools though. While I suppose one could use Project Search as a primary non-linear navigation tool and item selection utility (for making bookmarks, hyperlinks, loading as QR panels, etc.), that seems pretty awkward to me. With QS you do this:
I’m done. That’s it. The editor is where I want it to be. Or if I wanted to make a link in the current thing I’m editing, I drag and drop out of the result list and into the editor, and again I’m done. Plus, whatever I’m currently using Search Results for (whether in the foreground or background) is undisturbed.
Now I might fail in this task. Maybe I can’t remember the title at all, and any words I can think of that might be in it are too common. There is an easy enough outlet for that scenario by clicking the full search option at the bottom. That not only moves your session over to the more comprehensive tool, but resets its settings conducive to the task.
Project search is potentially way more labour-intensive, could have incorrect settings from whatever you were doing before, potentially locking the editor to avoid clicks meant to make bookmarks/links loading things instead, requires mouse usage to close the search result list manually, etc. It has undeniable advantages, to be clear, but as a full on replacement for a one-off navigation tool—well there is a reason we made a new feature for this. 
I guess of course if one never really jumps around much in a project, and has only ever tried to use the tool for what project search is better for, then it certainly could be seen as redundant. Nothing wrong with that at all, and I don’t mean to suggest otherwise—I may be weird in how much I jump around in a project from one distant chunk to the next.
I’ve never made a document bookmark except to try the feature out, once. I have all of 3 project bookmarks in my primary WIP. I don’t have cross-links from one piece of text to another. Heck, I don’t even use document notes. I use quick reference panels maybe once or twice a month.
I write fiction. My research and many of my project notes are in Evernote (in scans of my handwriting. in the case of notes.) My timeline is in Aeon Timeline. What notes I reference while I’m writing are mostly in the synopses and metadata (corkboard or outliner). And in general I don’t use Scrivener Mac features that are challenging to access from Scrivener iOS. (Metadata is available on iOS via Aeon Timeline, and research from Evernote.)
My way of working didn’t change much from Scrivener 2 to Scrivener 3, except I got comfortable with styles and the newfangled Compile.
So Quick Search? Why? I don’t use most of the features you mention. It just takes up toolbar real estate that I can use for the Project Search bar, which I do use.
P.S. I use the mouse a lot more than many writers so my toolbar is jammed.…
Yeah, like I say, if you don’t need to jump from one thing to another by name a lot, there isn’t much reason to use it. 
I suppose some might want to leave it there for the less cluttered access to writing stats and goals, though.
Nah. I put that stuff in my outliner, where there’s a lot more detail available. Other than that the editor footer works fine. 8)
