I tried to find this in the forums using some of the search words like alias search, but couldn’t find anything relevant. Sorry if I missed this. I don’t know if this is intentional design, a bug, or it could potentially be a feature request. But it could help as per me. Especially when there are a lot of files and you don’t quite remember whether the title is the file name or the alias.
Why do you need to use the “file:” search? I suspect that goes literally on the saved file name, only. However, if you just search for “abcde” (i.e. without using the “file:” prefix, you will get your file listed.
I just tried to create a new file, which I saved as “Test 2” and has an alias “Very Cool File Name”. Just searching a generic search for “very cool file name” will find Test 2.md. Searching with the “file:” prefix will not dig it out, as it isn’t even looking in the metadata for the files, only the literal name of the file.
To me the above makes sense and I don’t see it as a bug. I would say it is using unnecessary user-based specificity, and just like you won’t get the file if you use the “tags:” prefix, or the “path:” prefix, as it only looks for tags/paths, you will not get it listed with “file:” prefix as it only looks for file names, which isn’t either what you are actually looking for. If you are a little bit less specific and skip any special prefix it will get listed though.
+1
I use alias a lot in my vault. I appreciate being able to find notes based on their “title” whether the keyword comes from the file actual name or one of its aliases.
This approach is limited in the sense that I know that what I’m looking for notes on a specific topic and not anything random from my vault mentioning the keyword.
