Not Nate, but this clearly looks like a bug IMO (and therefore should be fixed eventually), but it needs to be in an actual bug report, not in the forums.
Not knowing any of KRunner’s internals, my guess is KRunner is either not preferring “first characters of first word”, or it’s being too strict about lower case (a.k.a. writing De would get you Deluge).
I checked, but even “De” still has the same problem.
Where can I file a bug report for this ?
In bugs.kde.org
I’ve had this issue in the past. The only way I got rid of it was doing a fresh Kubuntu install. That worked for a good while, but then the problem started up again. It appears that this is something that gets worse over time. There must be a file that is getting updated and making this mess. Where is that file? Can we just delete it when it starts getting messed up so as to start over fresh?
It’s generally easier to reset your data than to do a complete reinstall…
Just to be clear, I didn’t do a reinstall to fix the problem. I just happened to have done a reinstall and that fixed the problem.
So how can I reset the data just for the search and not reset all of my Plasma data?
I found that clearing history in krunner helps somewhat
However, mostly I tend to work around it - because it’s still really messy… but I’m confused, if you’re using kubutnu surely you’re on a really old version of Plasma anyway… I don’t remember any issues until the last month or so.
I’ll try clearing just the history. Thanks for the tip.
I’ve seen a problem like this before. I posted about it here in April 2023 ( Should kRUNNER be a application runner first? ). Maybe this isn’t the same problem we are talking about here, but to me it appeared related.
I update to the latest Kubuntu release whenever it comes out (twice a year) and I have the backports enabled, so I am always very up to date.
Even with the fuzzy search now mostly fixed, I’d still vouch for a toggle to disable it completely:
I have many search plugins enabled and applications is starred to have it prioritized, but now with fuzzy search also means I have more results to go through if what I want is not an application.
Cheers !