Should kRUNNER be a application runner first?

To brainstorm:

should krunner always provide a matching application as the first entry?

I am thinking about it because 80% of the time I use the runner combo afterwards I want to open an application.

what happens for me:
I type VLC and press Enter and it opens a config directory inside ~/snap/vlc for example

I am using Plasma since version 4 and I still am doing it expecting it to just launch the app and not the folder :smiley:

in 99% of the cases that is NOT what I want.

just did a little test with a fresh kde neon user edition:

Screenshot_20230405_203837

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I think that is a good idea. If not that, at least give us the option of tweaking things. For me, Firefox is the first option I get. Why is it different for you? Who knows? If I type sleep (looking for the go to sleep command) it doesnā€™t appear until the 4th item on the list. Even though I use that command every day, it never gets closer to the top. I would at least like to go in there and force it to the top.

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Maybe add a setting to sort the results based on user preferences?

Something like a ā€œdrag and dropā€ sort system in preferences

Either this or a more automatic way of ā€œlearningā€ the usersā€™ habits. E.g. counting how often the user selects certain categories and prioritize them before others.

That would also be fine.

In general i agree that for me, searches without a keyword should always have the applications on top. Thatā€™s the main reason why i have deactivated many modules that interfered with that too often.

+1 from me. Iā€™d say that itā€™d be awesome to have a manual priority override in the system settings; having written a KRunner plugin before, I know that plugins are allowed to set the priority of their contents; however, it should be fairly obvious that applications come before documents for most people IMO.

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We currently have code in place that puts often launched results higher. Having the same for categories seems reasonable. I currently work on unifying the different models we have for the KRunner sorting.
Once that is done, we have a central place to implement such features that gets used by KRunner and kicker/kickoff.

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Iā€™d like to rearrange the priority somewhere, would be great.

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I would prefere it if the name is fully fitting.
If not the document and afterwards the folder should be shown.

Assumption - if I type the full correct name (first letters), probably will start the application. If not it can be a similar name from document, folder or a search result

This has been done. I made a small blogpost about it: Unifying the KRunner sorting mechanisms for Plasma6 & further plans ā€” Alexander Lohnau

I have a big threading refactor ongoing and will work on those features afterward.

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Iā€™d say that I am more than halfway done implementing a feature to allow for a custom reordering of runners. I will try to finish it in the next two weeks.

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