I read the help concerning the search syntax and am unable to find the correct syntax to search
- the whole global inbox including subgroups
- search for technoid36 which could be in the name but most likely somewhere within the body of the item.
- will find all items containing technoid 36, either by itself as in "the password is technoid36 and cannot "or within a string such as rototechnoid36fizzle.
If possible, I would like to know 2 methods, one using a search string and the other using the method below
thank you very much
“contains” is your friend:
text:~"technoid36" finds the string solo and as part of other strings in the file content. But of course not technoid 36 with a space.
Similarly, `name:~“technoid36” should find the string in the file name.
But if you use “All” like in your screenshot, you will only find those files where the string is part of the content and the name. I can’t tell you whether that’s what you’re looking for or not.
Oh, and it’s all in the manual – that’s where I went to figure it out.
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Now I understand my mistake. Thank you very much !
I am sorry to bother you again. I just want to start by saying that I greatly appreciate your help, and did read the manual twice before posting my question, so I must be an idiot.
I am still confused … by other things and it is extremely frustrating. I find it rather incredible that if I wanted to search for something esoteric like the word count or postal code it would be easy, but looking for a word within the body of an item is for me a herculean task.
Let’s say that I took another route.
1- how do you call the search interface below which lists fields as opposed to using the search box?
2- to trigger that search interface, the only method I found was to type something in the search box (testing below) and after that I have to click on advanced button. If there a faster way to just make those fields appear directly ?
3- one of the reasons I was confused is that if I look at the list of fields (below), there is no “text” field which is the one you use in your post above (which works very well). The only alternative I found was to select “content” in the fields (shown below), but then I hit another obstacle which is that content has no “contains” option. It only has the “matches” option.
thank you VERY much for your help
Content and Text are synonymous.
From the Help: text: Text contents in a file.
However, this will be clearer in a future version of the documentation. 
Correct you have to have a search available to access the advanced search editor. Development would have to assess accessing it more directly (which I have also thought would be handy).
Look at the field for the Contents prefix: It clearly says Operators & Wildcards. Those are discussed in the previous section of the Appendix.
Alternatively…
And yes, development would have to assess allowing more than choosing the ~ (matches) operator. However, you do have the ability to use the contains operator, as seen in peoples’ examples.
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If you type the search string I suggested into the search field and then activate the advanced search, you’ll see how the “contains” from the text field is translated to the advanced dialog. That’s what I did anyway.
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Is the need to find a character string whether or not it’s a separate word?
I entered ~rac in the search bar, chose the database I wanted to search in the “search in” bar, and Devonthink found occurrences of Grace, cataract, track, extraction, cracked, and everything else that contained “rac”.
I changed “all matches” to “content matches” to search just document contents.
Is that what’s needed?
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thank you very much @BLUEFROG @Amontillado @chrillek . Your comments are very helpful.
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very interesting. thank you very much
