Smart Search
1Password’s Smart Search tool allows you to filter your items to find just what you need. Anytime you perform a search from the search box in the upper right of the wind, the Smart Search bar will appear under 1Password’s toolbar, offering a few standard ways to focus your search on things like usernames or item titles:
1Password’s Smart Search works similarly to filters in Mail and Smart Playlists in iTunes. Clicking the plus button next to the first item allows you to add additional rules for filtering your search results, and you can choose between matching “Any” rule you set or “All” of them.
To get an idea for how to use Smart Search, let’s say you run multiple Twitter accounts: one for yourself, another for auto-publishing your blog RSS feed, an alter-ego for fun, (such as the modernly evil Darth Vader), and a handful of accounts for various departments at work. If simply searching 1Password for “Twitter” doesn’t get you what you need quickly enough, you could use Smart Search to fine tune your results. You could add a rule that looks for a tag of “work” if you used 1Password 3’s new support for tags, or you could look only for items that have attachments. Perhaps you store notes or ideas about Twitter in 1Password Secure Notes, so you could specify a “Kind” rule to look only for Secure Notes, thus clearing all Twitter-related logins from your search results.
If you want to use this search often, you can click the Save button just below the search box to save it as a Smart Folder in 1Password’s sidebar.
This is just a simple Smart Search example based on typical usage. As you add more information to your 1Password items, Smart Search can filter more effectively for what you need to find.
When you are finished with your search your can click the (X) button in the search box to clear it.
Tips and things to know
- You can create a Smart Folder using the current search criteria by clicking the Save button
- Searching “Common” limits the search to unencrypted fields so 1Password can quickly find what you need without decrypting every single item (a potentially very slow operation). The “Common” criteria includes Title, Location (i.e. domain/url), and Tags
- To keep thing speedy, Smart Folders do not show item counts (View > Show Item Counts) if the search criteria requires items to be decrypted
- You can edit a Smart Folder by ctrl-clicking on it and selecting Edit Smart Folder