For me one of the downgrades that Pro instituted from ArcMap was the Locate function.
In ArcMap you could quickly and easily change a search to a specific attribute, partial or complete match.
In windows explorer we can write a search to only search the file name
name: <statement>
Is there any way to do this with Locate. It gets very frustrating with I am trying to find a something and it will show all features that have that value in there somewhere. For example trying to find a substation we call Benton County. And there a many hundreds of attributes that have Benton County as the name of the county they are in.
the option to search a single field in a single feature class is very detrimental and cumbersome when trying to work quickly.
And is there any way to make Layer Search the default and not Locate
In our use Locate is a valid option almost never.
Have you tried Searching in the Attribute Table? Open the attribute table > click on the field you want to search > Ctrl + F > enter search term > Enter. Can then select all matching features returned if desired.
Also, I assume you are currently using the Locate function like this?
From what I can see, there is no way of changing this to the default setting unfortunately.