Searching Messages on my Mac is a joke. If type the name of a friend in the search field, it returns (after unreasonable delay) various results, mostly of texts about the person I'm searching for.
How does it not realize that it should first search recipient names and present these results first? A search for "Delilah" should not show a bunch of texts about Delilah, obscuring the one thread with my friend Delilah.
So, I just tried this in Messages on Big Sur. If I search for a name, I get a list of existing-conversations that the person with that name is in at the top of the results, then the list of text results within conversations.
Messages on Big Sur is (basically) the iOS Messages app ported over with Catalyst, so it has a lot of improvements compared to the highly-stale app it replaced.
I think there’s a separate idiomatic autocomplete flow for what you’re trying to do. Try hitting “New Message”; typing your friend’s name; and selecting the result. The New Message window will transform into the existing-conversation window for that contact.
Not saying having it also work from search wouldn’t be good — but having this flow available is probably why the other issue hasn’t been fixed sooner.
> ry hitting “New Message”; typing your friend’s name; and selecting the result. The New Message window will transform into the existing-conversation window for that contact.
I think this is how MS teams chat works too. It kind of makes sense, because it has a workflow for solving the "do you want your existing chat with Alice, or are you trying to start a new group chat with Alice & Bob" .
It does make sense if you're looking to send a new message. In my case, I'm typically doing a search so I can find information/photos from that thread. In this context, it's not so intuitive, and it never occurred to me to even try.
How does it not realize that it should first search recipient names and present these results first? A search for "Delilah" should not show a bunch of texts about Delilah, obscuring the one thread with my friend Delilah.