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]

Tableau 2.1, « Quick guide to search terms » lists the short form of each search term.