I believe this is a new behaviour; I’d be surprised never to have noticed before otherwise.
From the deck list, press “b”. Not all cards are listed; only the one from the currently selected deck. Which is not expected since I was not in a deck at the time I opened the card browser. Worse, the search bar is empty, which led me to believe that no search currently occurred. I need to click on it, press enter, to do an actual search without constraint.
I remarked it because I was looking for the last note I created, and was effraid because it did not appear. I thought during an instant that I had lost all notes created recently. Until I realized why not all notes were here
This was changed a few versions ago. There were some discussions, because on the one hand, the old “Press Enter to show current deck” prompt was awkward and had to go in favour of a proper placeholder. On the other hand, people wanted to easily bring up the current deck and showing all cards by default could also be a performance issue.
So the current behaviour was decided on, which also allows you to customise the default search in the preferences.
That would obscure the placeholder. Ideally both hints would be shown, but since we have to choose one, I slightly lean towards the placeholder, because that means the searchbar remains empty, which is usually more ergonomic.
The searchbar should already have focus, and it does on my system. So pressing Enter is enough.
I can’t remember if we discussed this previously, but I presume one option would be to have the search default to the collection when the main window focused on the deck list. Given that there’s only a faint indicator of the current deck in the deck list, this might be a bit less surprising. On the other hand, it means the behaviour on opening is context-dependent, which might be more confusing for some other people. No strong feelings on my end; happy to go with whatever the majority thinks is best.
No strong feelings on my end; happy to go with whatever the majority thinks is best.