Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
I have confirmed the issue with the filter not being reset after closing the search dialog and I will incorporate a fix into the next release.
The filter search uses the same pattern matching syntax as found in other areas of FlashFXP. As you discovered this is not a your typical word search, I suppose we could adapt our search to support a couple different methods but we would need to ensure that the results returned are exactly what the user wants.
For example some customers use our FTP file search to adjust the file attributes on 1000s of files in one go, if we allowed a loose word match it could allow some unexpected results to be shown, with 1000s of files there is no room for error, especially if the customer were to perform a delete operation rather than just adjust the file attributes.
If you're not familiar with the pattern matching in FlashFXP we use a subset of regular expressions. (see the help file >
Pattern Matching)
In your example you use "2012 project" but you could use "2012?project" following our regular expression pattern above.. however 2012 must come before project to match, it would not match project 2012.
The reason the file search window doesn't have a minimize button is that this can cause some confusion with users who have minimized the FTP file search window and then forget about it being minimized and wonder why the main window has limited functionality.
Since you can still perform some commands while the file search window is open most people I've talked to tend to move the window to the side of the main window and then use both side by side to suite their needs.