The first character is lost sometimes in spotlight window

I Have the bug, but none of these 3 apps.

Same problem here. Running OSX 10.11.3. First character is lost

I believe I have found a solution!

I had the same problem: starting Spotlight, and occasionally the first character went missing, thus rendering wrong search results and often opening a semi-random application.

As some else already pointed out: look at keyboard modifying situations...

Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts & select "Input Sources"

In my case, these two options "Select the previous input source" and the next were activated, with a warning icon at the side, mentioning "This hot key conflicts with other hot keys".

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Deactivating these two options solved my "disappearing first character" problem!

Thanks for sharing this. Unfortunately in my case there is no conflict in the keyboard shortcuts and the problem is still there. It seems to have become somehow less frequent recently, possibly after the latest OS update, but it's hard to quantify this precisely because I've also been using spotlight less as it had become frustrating.

Hey guys,

I had the same problem and it was driving me absolutely nuts. I use the Command + Space keyboard shortcut to launch and switch between apps on OS X.

Here’s what fixed it for me…

1. Open Spotlight in System Preferences

2. UNCHECK Allow Spotlight Suggestions in Spotlight and Look up.

The first letter has not dropped since changing this a few hours ago.

It's unchecked but the problem is still present.

Hmmm… I’m running 10.11.4 Beta (15E33e) and after I unchecked that setting it fixed things for me.

Maybe try relaunching Finder after you uncheck that setting? I also removed the duplicate keyboard shortcut mentioned previously (5 posts ago).

Unfortunately did not work for me. I tried resetting my computer too.

The issue has reappeared, occasionally, on my Mac as of last night. An erase and reinstall of the OS had meant it had been fine for over a month up until that point.

The set of apps and services I use is pretty consistent, so I really can't think of anything new that I would have suddenly done to trigger its return.

thanks for the the investigation, indeed those 3 apps mess with the keyboard, I now uninstalled all of them and that's not it. I guess it's something else which triggers this, should be a price for the person who finds out.

I also changed the spotlight shortcut to command-shift-space, this also didn't help. One thing I noticed though is that the issue happens most after the computer is woken up from sleep, when using it constantly for 10-20 minutes the issue appears less and less

I have solved the issue now by installing Alfred. One of my colleagues had this issue years ago and he said that Alfred solved it for him. Since the installation (2 weeks ago) I didn't have this issue which proves that the problem lies in Spotlight itself and not in the keyboard settings.