This is squarely a KDE question, but I haven’t got an account at the KDE forum so I thought I would ask here anyway.
Since a few Tumbleweed releases back, the tab bar of the Kate text editor gets “hot keyed”. That is, when you press the Alt key, one letter or number gets an underscore decoration in the file name as shown in the tabs. If while holding Alt one then presses the relevant letter or number key, the focus switches to that file.
I am sure some people find that useful, perhaps if you’re always working with the same files and get to remember the hotkeys for each of them.
Unfortunately, it also interferes with other hotkeys. In my case, once I have sufficient files open, there is an almost 100% chance that one of them is going to be hot keyed to Alt+R or Alt+A… which are of course what I use to do a Replace Next or Replace All respectively, when the Search & Replace bar is visible.
I searched both through the Kate menus and manual and on the web but cannot seem to find a way to disable that automatic hot keying to revert back to the old behaviour. If anyone knows and wants to share that would be much appreciated.