In D15011#342508, @filipf wrote:

In D15011#342503, @urohan wrote:

In D15011#342449, @ngraham wrote:

Ah, I didn't even know that the Activity Switcher had a search field. I suspect that @sharvey, the fellow who did most of the work to improve the Widget Explorer's search field, didn't know either.

I agree that it's not ideal for these to be different. We should make the Activity Switcher's search field be like the one in Widget Explorer. @sharvey, since you have some familiarity with that code now, would you be interested in making basically the same change there too?

It's funny... Frankly speaking, I prefer the way search field implemented in Plasma Activity Manager. It's pretty graceful. More so, search field is needed only on demand (like search in Dolphin file manager or search in the Start Menu of Windows 10).

Anyway, I am not yet a contributor so my words are weightless.

Well people have been complaining that it's not obvious that there is a search field and you kind of also want to be consistent thoughout Plasma. You can't always please everyone though. I plan on releasing a fork of Kickoff without this patch to the KDE Store for the people who either just prefer the philosophy behind the old way or who will suffer a visual regression due to having very transparent or funky desktop themes. So no worries, the beauty of Plasma is that it doesn't lock you into one solution.

In D15011#342504, @sharvey wrote:

In D15011#342503, @urohan wrote:

Anyway, I am not yet a contributor so my words are weightless.

Not true! We listen to everyone's input. Unfortunately, it seems you're a little late to this party and the changes are rolling forward...

In D15011#342449, @ngraham wrote:

Ah, I didn't even know that the Activity Switcher had a search field. I suspect that @sharvey, the fellow who did most of the work to improve the Widget Explorer's search field, didn't know either.

I agree that it's not ideal for these to be different. We should make the Activity Switcher's search field be like the one in Widget Explorer. @sharvey, since you have some familiarity with that code now, would you be interested in making basically the same change there too?

In D15011#315779, @ngraham wrote:

Awesome, thanks for introducing that additional information, @filipf. It seems like we have some inconsistency here in our Plasma search fields; I will summarize:

Interface	Search field has keyboard focus by default?	Search field visible by default?	Search field visibly focused by default?	When does it become visibly focused?	After gaining keyboard focus, when does it lose it?
Discover	Yes	Yes	No	After typing or clicking on it	When you click on anything else
Klipper	Yes	Yes	No	After typing or clicking on it	Never
Widget Explorer	Yes	Yes	Yes	N/A; starts out focused	After using the ⇥ key to move focus to the list
Kickoff	Yes	No	N/A; not visible by default	After typing or clicking on it	Never
System Settings	Yes	Yes	Yes	N/A; always focused	After navigating to a KCM
Kicker	Yes	Yes	Yes	N/A; starts out focused	After you start to navigate the list

It seems like for the most part the interfaces that make the search field invisible or have a different appearance by default are in the minority and are being inconsistent with everyone else. So I'm glad that we generally have consensus that fixing that for Kickoff here is a good idea. I may do the same for the Widget Explorer too; then we'll have 100% consistent visible-by-default search fields!

After performing this investigation and all the accompanying behavioral tests, I realize now that there's a very good reason to keep keyboard focus on the search field even after the list of search results is being navigated with the up and down arrow keys: it's so you can edit your search query even after navigating the list. The only reason why Kickoff doesn't do this is because it has multiple lists that can be navigated between with the left and right arrow keys. Kickoff doesn't do that, so I think we have to keep that with this patch.

So onto the next subject: whether or not to have the search field visibly focused by default, or instead to only show the focus when you click on it or start typing. All of the clients throughout Plasma give the search field keyboard focus by default, even if the visual appearance doesn't reflect this, but we are very inconsistent with the visual appearance: System Settings and Kickoff have it visible and focused by default; klipper and Discover have it visible but not visibly focused until you click or type; Kickoff and the Widget explorer have it invisible until you click or type.

I'll admit that I have a preference for giving the search field visible focus when it actually has keyboard focus. From that perspective, this patch implements that preference, though I'm willing to continue the conversation to achieve consensus, because right now the HIG doesn't say anything about this subject, and it should. In fact it does not address the use case of using LineEdit controls as search fields, or even anything about focus behavior at all.

However, regardless of what we choose, I would like to move towards unifying the interfaces in the above table, because inconsistency in something basic like this is not good. So if we decide to make search fields that have keyboard focus by default not visibly focused until clicked on or text is typed, then we should do it everywhere to maintain consistency. This is another reason why I prefer the shows-focus-when-it-has-focus approach, because deviating from this consistently requires custom code in every client. I feel like we are not really objecting to this concept behaviorally, but rather to the visual consequences of implementing it consistently.

Thoughts?