It would be really useful to use text to search through the layer names. It becomes pretty difficult to find the right layer when you are dealing with 20+ layers. It would be helpful if the text on the layers were a little big bigger and brighter too.
Marking this confirmed as it is a wish list item. The UI might need some discussion before this is done. I can see why some people might want this filtering, but I personally would not want a search box shown on the UI all the time. A lot of people, including myself, only use a few layers, so I try to make the layers docker take up as little space as possible.
There are other places where search would be useful, like with blending modes. Maybe we could hack something together where ctrl-f (for instance) would start doing a search in the ui element the cursor is hovering over, but that would be really hard to discover.
One potential solution would be to place a magnifying glass icon or something by the color filter button. If you toggle that on, it could show a search field on the layer docker. To take up even less space, we could put the toggle by the configure options in the layers docker that allows you to change the layer thumbnail size. Enabling that could show/hide the filter text field
Marking as duplicate of the one assigned... *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 399099 ***