The Find toolbar appears after you press ⌘-F with focus in the view pane. This adds a toobar isside, and acroos the top of the view pane.
If the Find toolbar is already visible, ⌘-F moves the keyboard focus to the Find toolbar's search field. [Esc] dismisses the Find toolbar. The width of the search term input box of the find bar grows larger if the window is sufficiently wide. To dismiss (hide) the toolbar click the toolbar's Done button.
Main controls
Three independent buttons allow setting per-note search scope to use data from a User (attribute) and/or Text ($Text) and/or Name (note's title: $Name), or both. By default only Text and Name are pre-selected.
Click the User button to additionally search a single user attribute, select from a pop-up list of all user attribute for the current document. Dismiss the popover and the label of the User button becomes that of the chosen attribute and operates as a toggle like the other two buttons. for instance if 'SomeAttribute' is selected, User becomes SomeAttribute. As only one user attribute selection is allowed, selecting a new user attribute will replace the existing choice. The feature is reset to 'User' (i.e. no selection) at the beginning of each session, i.e. each time the TBX is (re-)opened..
Additional controls
A prototype-based filter control is offered, essentially adding a fourth query term for an exact string match on the selected prototype's $Name.. The pop-up list displays all the document's currently defined prototypes. Selecting a prototype, filters the Find results to only those items using the selected prototype.
The pop-up menu in the search term input box has 3 tick-option items. These are for case-sensitive search, disabling parsing for regular expression use, and an option to use whole document (default) search or only search in selected container(s). From v11.60, a new menu option on the Find bar's search menu allows query-based search.
Entering a search term
Enter a search term in the box and press Return (↩) to see a pop-up list of matches. Click the 'x' button in the input box to clear the search. Click on the magnifying glass icon to see a pop-up list of previous searches (up to 10 are stored); that list can be cleared via the same menu's options. Dragging the view pane wider will increase the width if the search term input box.
Autocomplete suggestions. In macOS 10.14+ (but only in supported languages), Find offers suggested related words as possible autocompletions in the Find bar and in torn-off Find windows. Otherwise, the Find Bar does not display a menu of related words as autocomplete suggestions, such a suggestions list may be requested by pressing the F5 key.
Double-clicking the chosen user attribute's UI button is a convenient shortcut to searching for the currently entered find string in that attribute.
See also—notes linking to here: