is the "show search options" gone?

Hey, @uhuhleuh. Thanks for the comments! For the most part @mia is right. There are some things we just haven't gotten to yet, and search is definitely one of the features that will be getting more attention.

in the lack of being able to enter a search expression (Gmail style)

I'm glad you mentioned this. We've started down this path with vault and tag filters. So you can search, for example =tag:finance mybank to find all items matching mybank with the finance tag. I'd like to see more of these kinds of expressions and the ability to combine them, and maybe eventually some UI to make them more discoverable.

Not to worry, 1Password 7 will still be supported after version 8 is publicly released, so you can keep using that version if it suits your needs better while we continue to work on bringing more advanced search capabilities to 1Password 8. 👍