MaskedNybbles

I understand what you mean, and tend to agree, although I had some success with zypper se -d '/CD.*burn/'—'CD.*(burn)|(writer)' produced more results than I’d like—for your example. It also appears apt-cache search already searches descriptions by default.

Looking at results for just /CD/—amid the many poor results—it seems my earlier search missed some due to differing word usage, such as recording rather than burning, and whatnot.

According to the man-page at https://manpages.debian.org/buster/apt/apt.8.en.html and the linked https://manpages.debian.org/buster/manpages/regex.7.en.html, you should be able to use regex like apt search '(-|^)vim(-|$)' to get vim as either whole name or related packages with containing vim with leading or trailing dashes, or apt search '^vim' to get any beginning with vim—in case that helps. zypper lets me do essentially that with zypper se '/(-|^)vim(-|$)/' and such.

Took a look and the layout seems to have hyphen and en dash—default—for Alt Gr + - and Alt Gr + Shift + -, respectively, on both my regular layout and the German layout on my machine (added the German layout just to check). I wound up using the compose sequence of three dashes, but would prefer something with fewer strokes (and may do something about it—maybe).