On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 2:29 AM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk> wrote:

I can imagine it being amazingly useful (particularly with autocompletion,
but even without...). Alternatively, given the major role categories play
for Commons compared to most mediawiki projects, is it possible to simply
enable searching the category: namespace by default?

It's already in the default search mask, so categories and other
default search namespaces will come up in fulltext search (your own
user preferences may be different, but that's the behavior for new or
logged out users) -- but the instant lookup (what used to be the "Go"
button) only works on the main namespace, or if you provide the
namespace prefix/alias.