Quick search
A search bar that filters the tiles on the current dashboard as you type, and opens the one you pick — without reaching for the mouse.
It is a widget, not page furniture
Quick search used to be part of the page chrome: LaunchPad rendered a search bar above the grid on every dashboard, whether anyone wanted one there or not.
It is now the search widget type. You place it like any other widget,
which means you choose whether a dashboard has one at all, where it sits,
and how wide it is.
Upgrading? Existing dashboards do not get a search widget automatically, so the bar disappears from them after this upgrade. To get it back, edit the dashboard, choose Add widget → Search, and put it where you want it — most people place it full-width across the top row, which is where the old bar was.
Using it
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
/ | Focus the search input from anywhere on the page |
Ctrl+K / Cmd+K | The same, and suppresses the browser's own shortcut |
↑ / ↓ | Move through the matches |
Enter | Open the selected tile, honouring its configured link target |
Esc | Clear the query, undim the grid, return focus to the tiles |
Typing narrows the grid by de-emphasising non-matching tiles rather than removing them, so the layout never reflows underneath you while you type. Matches rank prefix first, then mid-string, then subsequence.
If a dashboard carries more than one search widget, the first one takes the
/ and Ctrl+K shortcut — two inputs cannot both hold focus. Remove it
and the next one takes over. A dashboard with no search widget simply has
no shortcut.
Configuration
Two settings on the widget itself:
Placeholder text — leave empty for the default, which advertises the two shortcuts.
When nothing matches — what happens when the query matches no tile:
| Option | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Use the administrator setting | Inherit the instance-wide default (the shipped default) |
| Show "no results" only | Stay on the dashboard and announce the empty result |
| Hand off to Nextcloud search | Pass the query to Nextcloud's own unified search |
| Open a web search | Open a new tab using an https URL template containing {query} |
The instance-wide default is the quicksearch_fallback_target app config,
set in LaunchPad's admin settings. A widget that inherits it follows
whatever the administrator configures; a widget with its own choice
overrides it.
occ config:app:set launchpad quicksearch_fallback_target --value='unified-search'
An unset value means "show no-results only" — LaunchPad never navigates a user away from their dashboard by default.
Accessibility
The bar is a WCAG 2.2 AA combobox: role="search" with a programmatically
associated label, role="listbox" results, aria-activedescendant
tracking the keyboard selection, and an aria-live announcement of the
match count or the no-match state. The selected match is marked with an
icon as well as with colour, so the selection is never conveyed by colour
alone.
See also
- Widgets — the full widget catalog and how placements persist
- Custom Tiles — what the searchable labels come from