GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 753557
Escape should close search bar
Last modified: 2017-08-23 11:07:00 UTC
If you start tying in a nautilus window you quickly find that you've opened the search bar. While this is reasonable behavior on the part of nautilus, I find that I do this inadvertently rather often. This is problematic as there appears to be no way to close the search bar, with the keyboard or otherwise. I would expect that pressing the escape key would close the search bar, or at very least clear the query but this does not happen. There are really two issues here, * typing in a nautilus window is essentially a non-reversible action; once the search bar is open there is no way to close it * there is no convenient way (i.e. using only the keyboard) to clear the search terms
That you don't know it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Eg ctrl-a ctrl-x to clear the entry. I do agree that it would be sensible to dismiss the search bar on escape. That is what the file chooser does.
On Fedora 25 / Gnome 3.22.2, press Escape closes the search bar when the focus is in the "input text zone", so when you have the possibility to tap or correct your search. But if you click on a result, the focus is changed and Escape doesn't nothing. I think and would like that, in this second case, Escape closes the search bar too.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 685120 ***