When clicking the menu button on the desktop panel or pressing the Windows key, the application launcher opens with the search field focused (so far everything as expected). Without typing anything, the first entry in my list of favourites is marked with a selection border (even though the actual focus is in the search field), so I would expect that entry to be executed when I simply hit Enter, but that doesn't happen. I first have to move the focus over to the icons panel, so it's either "Left Arrow + Enter" (whereas "Up Arrow + Enter" unintuitively messes with the categories) or "Enter + Enter", which is confusing and annoying. This focusing behaviour gets even more annoying for search results. Here a single Enter stroke already launches the selected application (which is good), but sometimes the search is quite dumb and doesn't select the desired app first (and apparently doesn't remember previous searches either). One example would be "Discord" and "Discover". When I type "dis", "Discover" is always the entry that gets selected first (but is literally never the one I want), so I either have to spell out the whole name or simply select the entry above it, which is "Discord". However, to select it, I have to tap the Up Arrow key twice: Once for selecting the results panel and one more time for changing the selection before I can press Enter. This way, my muscle memory trained on other platforms has more than once launched "Discover" instead of "Discord". STEPS TO REPRODUCE (scenario 1) 1. Launch application menu 2. Press enter to launch pre-selected app from favourites panel 3. Get frustrated STEPS TO REPRODUCE (scenario 2) 1. Launch application menu 2. Type something 3. Try to select result above pre-selected entry by pressing up-arrow OBSERVED RESULT App favourites or search results panel needs to be selected explicitly before keyboard can interact with it. EXPECTED RESULT Results panel shouldn't have separate focus. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Linux/KDE Plasma: Ubuntu 21.04 KDE Plasma Version: 5.22.4 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.85 Qt Version: 5.15.2
This behaviour seems to be much improved in KDE Neon Unstable edition (Frameworks 5.86.0, Plasma 5.22.80)
Indeed, this was fixed with the code rewrite in 5.23.