Application menu occasionally "freaks out" while trying to search for a program

[ArrayBolt3]

Expected Behavior

If you open the application menu and begin typing, it should search for menu items that match your search term, updating the displayed list of items as you type.

Current Behavior

Every so often, I accidentally manage to get my application menu to do this while searching for an app:

After typing the first three letters or so, one of the menus will suddenly open despite me having not hovered over it, then the "primary" app menu (which only has "Featherpad" in it in the above screenshot) will update to contain only items matching my search term and leave the popped-out menu "floating". When this happens, the keyboard focus inexplicably gets removed from the search text box, making any further keypresses ignored. Furthermore, clicking on the desired app while the menu is in this weird state results in the menu simply closing and no app being launched.

This happens quite often to me (multiple times a day), but it is not reliably reproducible. It happens "when it feels like it", for lack of a better description.

Possible Solution

I don't ever remember this happening on LXQt 0.17.0. I do seem to have noticed it happening since LXQt 1.2.0 at least, maybe even a bit earlier. It might be possible to bisect between those points and find whatever caused this issue.

Steps to Reproduce (for bugs)

1. Open the application menu.
2. Start typing to find an app (Featherpad is a good one since not many apps start with the letters "fea" so the primary app menu can shrink down when you search for it, making the floating secondary menu stick out).
3. After you get the third letter or so typed the bug may trigger.

System Information

• LXQt Version: 1.4.0 (also occurs on 1.3.0)
• Distribution & Version: Lubuntu Noble Development Version
• Qt Version: 5.15.10
• liblxqt Version: 1.4.0

[tsujan]

Do you use Openbox? If yes, can you reproduce it with another WM?

[ArrayBolt3]

We are using Openbox, yes. Is there a particular WM I should try? If not, I'll swap to xfwm and see what happens.

[tsujan]

Yes, xfwm is good.

[ArrayBolt3]

I am able to reproduce this using xfwm4. I started with Openbox and then launched xfwm4 with xfwm4 --replace, but it did still happen.

[palinek]

The way to reproduce is:

• open the menu
• navigate to some menu (e.g. pressing arrow down to highlight the first menu item) and then focus back to the search (e.g. pressing arrow up)
• type "fea" quickly (this probably does matter, but considering the system with with Accessories as the item in top menu and installed featherpad app)
• the menu rebuilds just after 350ms timeout, but the "letters navigation" in menu was already performed

I'll make a PR for avoiding navigation while search widgets have focus.

[palinek]

@ArrayBolt3 Can you, please, check with #2134 ?

[ArrayBolt3]

Will do, I'll try to get that done hopefully some time tonight.