How to view table data in the newest 6.0 MySQL Workbench
If you just want to see the data in a table then do a select for that table in a query editor. That's the most basic operation wrt SQL. Using the table search with some "mysterious query" certainly does not help to accomplish that task. Search is, as the name implies, a search. Put the value you are looking for in the search field and let MySQL Workbench do the search for you. As easy as that.

If you want a mouse only approach then open the schema in the tree and right click on the table you want to see. A context menu appears and the first entry is the select (which takes the limit into account that is set in the preferences, to avoid pulling a potential million rows).



The old "Edit table data" was a very similar shortcut, but that uses the EDIT keyword to tell the editor that the result is editable. That was an intermediate addition as MySQL Workbench had no other way to know if that is the case. In the meantime the application can detect this automatically (a PK must exist, no aggregates, no joins etc.), so the EDIT keyword as well as the shortcut have been removed.