Some search terms can be written using 「short」 forms, which consist of a tilde (「~」) followed by a single character that identifies the term, and finally the arguments (if any) to the term. For instance, the short form of ?name(aptitude) is ~n aptitude.

When writing a term using its short term, 「whitespace」 -- that is, space characters, tabs, and so on -- will break the term off and start a new term. For instance, 「~mDaniel Burrows」 will match any package whose maintainer field contains 「Daniel」 and whose name contains 「Burrows」. To include whitespace characters in the search expression, you can either place a tilde in front of it (as in Daniel~ Burrows) or place quotation marks around it (as in "Debian Project" or even Debian" "Project). Inside a quoted string, the backslash character (「\」) can be used to cancel the special meaning of the quotation mark: for instance, ~d"\"email" will match any package whose description contains a quotation mark followed immediately by email. ^[13]

表 2.1. 「Quick guide to search terms」 lists the short form of each search term.