A controversial feature, one I even railed against in the olden days, seems to have stopped working. Pressing ctrl+f here, or on QT3, just uses my browser’s search. It no longer pops up the Discourse search bar in “thread” mode. I’ve tried Firefox and Chrome, logged in or logged out. I’ve search this forum and google and I can’t see any announcement that this feature was removed. So I don’t really know what category to put this in. i.e. should that feature still work, and it’s broken, therefore it’s a bug. Was the feature removed intentionally? Is it just me, can others see this failure? (I’m guessing it is just me, as I can’t see anyone else talking about it)

Yes, removed intentionally. If you miss the Discourse search within longer topics you can use the / shortcut.

It’s funny because I actually liked using Ctrl+F for longer topics. Oh well, change must be… Thanks for all the hard work making Discourse the best platform ever.

That’s funny, I recently read old topics about how Discourse hijacked the Ctrl+f feature of the browser. I understand the intent, but in 7+ years of using Discourse, it always annoyed me more than it helped me. I’m happy to see the feature gone, especially since there’s the \ shortcut to replace it (even though it requires pressing two keys on a French keyboard). :discourse2:

Some are happy, some are sad. :slightly_smiling_face: In fact, I would prefer it to become a customizable option that defaults to the / key. Because different groups have different feelings about this, the first Discourse site I encountered required pressing Ctrl+F twice, and according to incomplete statistics, more than 70% of people around me prefer pressing Ctrl+F multiple times to switch between multiple functions that are all for searching purposes, rather than using different key bindings to distinguish between different search functions. Especially since this feature was later changed so that when the number of posts is not large (and it would be even better if this threshold could also be defined), there is no need to press Ctrl+F twice.

Discourse no longer hijacks ctrl+f?

Product Support

Moin January 15, 2026, 11:26pm 2

The shortcut was removed in April
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/32281

However, it appears that the related topics have not been updated.

Topic		Replies	Views
Disabling Ctrl-F Product Support	4	566	May 25, 2024
Search keyboard shortcuts hijacked? Bug keyboard-shortcuts	12	3105	January 20, 2017
Discourse taking over Ctrl-F Feature	21	14327	October 5, 2014
Options to disable hijack of CMD+F / CTRL+F and "/" keys for search? Feature keyboard-shortcuts	44	51341	June 25, 2019
Remove overriding of cmd/ctrl-f UX keyboard-shortcuts	34	1656	June 20, 2024

Discourse no longer hijacks ctrl+f?

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