Hello everyone

I recently installed kde4 and I'm struggling with some differences from kde3.

I was used to search in kate and krite pressing ctrl+f, but in the old version the search bar (search modal window, really) used to close automatically after my return, while the new (ehm, new to me ) search bar keeps the focus after finding the first result. For me is very annoying, because I type very fast, and after my return I assume I have the focus on the curson in the text (most of the times I press some arrow, expecting to move the cursor in the text, with the result I instead navigate in the search history in the bar, ouch... and, I don't know why, if i try to resume my search, I can't find it keeping pressing the up arrow, as if my current search wasn't still in the history, so no more available... so I have to retype it).
Now I know it's maybe only my problem, but, is there a setting somewhere (I seem not to find one in the rc config files) to get the search bar to automatically close after my first return?

The new search bar is surely very powerful, but I guess I need that kind of advanced search only once in a while; in 99% of the cases I'm simply searching a specific line of code, so ctrl+f and F3/shift+F3 after that is the best tool.

Can you help me?

Thanks a lot in advance!

I know of no such option in kwrite/kate 4+, so you might just have to do a little bit of retraining to hit Esc after you've found what you're looking for to dismiss the find dialog, or try some other text editors to see if they provide the behavior you're looking for.

ETA: unless you're willing to delve into the source code, make the change and recompile.

Thank you, I wanted to be sure I did not miss the option somewhere, because I found no options at all about the search bar... In other editors, e.g., it is possible to disable the incremental search (that is also something I would have disable by default).

You're right. I need to do a retraining, but somehow for this particular change it seems very hard to me to achieve it

I will take a look at other editors, but I tried so many in the past, kate/kwrite have always been my favs. For now I'm using medit only when I'm in a hurry and I do not want to struggle with the kate search bar.

I'm not familiar with changing the kde source code: I will take a look at that also. The search bar behavior is something I will find in kate source or it is something more globally kde related?

The point is, also, I am well aware that I switched to kde4 with sooo much delay, so, for most of the things I consider bugs, I tend to suspect I'm misunderstanding new behaviors I'm simply not familiar with. E.g., in kate, when opening files, I was used to go through recent opened files with up/down arrows, while now I can pick only 3 files in this way, despite the list contains all recent files, but I have to pick them clicking with the mouse (I'm faster with keyboard shortcuts, I avoid mouse when possible)... or, in konqueror, if I try to replace the keyboard shortcut for Home (the new one is Alt+Home, the kde3 one was Ctrl+Home), it opens the home link in a new tab, no matter the key combination I pick: it works as expected only keeping Alt+Home. And more in general, some key combination are accepted when assigning shortcuts, but then they do not work (while they worked in kde3, so I had to change many shortcuts I used to open applications). And so on. All things weird to me, maybe normal for kde4 users?

smartino wrote:I'm not familiar with changing the kde source code: I will take a look at that also. The search bar behavior is something I will find in kate source or it is something more globally kde related?

I'm not entirely sure, but my guess is that you should find it in the kate source.

smartino wrote:The point is, also, I am well aware that I switched to kde4 with sooo much delay, so, for most of the things I consider bugs, I tend to suspect I'm misunderstanding new behaviors I'm simply not familiar with.

Kde 4 certainly was radically different from Kde 3. While I used Kde 3 for a few years, I wasn't very entrenched and was able to transition to Kde 4 pretty easily. Others had more struggles and there were a lot of forum posts and bug reports to restore functionality from Kde 3 into Kde 4, and certainly not all of the previous behavior was restored (partially intentionally because the old behavior was replaced by something generally accepted as better (though not always by everyone) and partially unintentionally just because everything was rewritten from scratch and the old behavior was just lost in the transition).
The Kde 5 transition wasn't nearly as radical - the underlying libraries were reorganized and everything was updated to work with Qt 5, but it wasn't the wholesale rewrite that Kde 4 was, so very little of the existing functionality was lost unless intentionally replaced or removed.

For the record, I'm still on Kde 4 (ubuntu 14.04). What distro and Kde versions are you currently using?

smartino wrote:
E.g., in kate, when opening files, I was used to go through recent opened files with up/down arrows, while now I can pick only 3 files in this way, despite the list contains all recent files, but I have to pick them clicking with the mouse (I'm faster with keyboard shortcuts, I avoid mouse when possible)...

If you are referring to navigating the menu under File -> Open Recent, I am able to navigate using the up/down arrows through all entries in the menu.

Sometimes it is useful to create a new test user and use that for testing some of these behaviors. If you can replicate the behavior under a new, from-scratch user then you know the problem is in the application. If you can't replicate the behavior under a new, from-scratch user then the problem must be with some configuration (and you can investigate that by comparing the config files between the two users - generally stored in ~/.kde(4)/share/config or ~/.kde(4)/share/apps)

smartino wrote:or, in konqueror, if I try to replace the keyboard shortcut for Home (the new one is Alt+Home, the kde3 one was Ctrl+Home), it opens the home link in a new tab, no matter the key combination I pick: it works as expected only keeping Alt+Home. And more in general, some key combination are accepted when assigning shortcuts, but then they do not work (while they worked in kde3, so I had to change many shortcuts I used to open applications). And so on. All things weird to me, maybe normal for kde4 users?

I can replicate this behavior - using the default key binding of Alt+Home it navigates the current tab to the home page, updating the key binding to Ctrl+Home it opens new tabs to the home page. That is really odd to have that kind of dual behavior.

Searching bugs.kde.org, I see https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176180 and https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211061 which mention that the behavior for Ctrl+ shortcuts to open in a new tab is intentional.
Doing a little more testing, using Ctrl+ other keys similarly opens the home page in new tabs while using Alt+ other keys opens the home page in the current tab.
Depending on if you are using konqueror for file browsing vs. web browsing you might consider trying out newer more dedicated alternatives: Dolphin for file management, Rekonq or Qupzilla (or firefox or chrome if you aren't that tied to qt/kde apps) for web browsing.