E.g. I want to be able to filter for all open, in progress, or reopened issues in a specific project with summaries that do not contain the phrase ""Merge request".
According to the help files, you can search for entries where the text contains A but not B, but you simply cannot search for entries where the text does not contain B. All text exclusions require a text inclusion term before they work properly.
I find this very limiting and unnecessary.
There are many text search syntaxes, of which the most famous is regexp. Many of them allow such a search. it is sad that the Jira text search capability does not allow this. Perhaps the best solution is to allow regexp searches as an advanced function.
We are tracking this general issue at:
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1560
Please could you vote there, and add yourself as a watcher if you wish to be notified of updates.
Cheers,
Jeff