First, I like the proposal. But here are some worries about it. This is probably obvious, but when activated, QS often already has something in the first pane---the result of the previous action. This might be a document that I recently opened or an application that I recently launched or a phone number that I recently looked up and copied to the clipboard or displayed in large text. Sometimes I want to perform some new action on this thing; sometimes I want to arrow away from it (into it, or to one of its neighbors, or to its parent folder, etc.); but most often, I want to start a completely new search. So this seems like a case where the first pane has been populated by some previous activity, but I would not want the second pane to be active by default.
So the proposal cannot be read too broadly. The narrowest proposal would be to have this behavior for cmd-G and cmd-esc. The one frequent use case for me that goes against this is cmd-G (or `qs .`) to get a file or folder, then arrowing to browse the file system. But that is less frequent, so I could "tab back" to do that. But Rob's suggestion that it would apply to the result of Get Path suggests this behavior not just when the first pane has been populated by cmd-G or cmd-Esc, but whenever it has been populated by some immediately preceding act (cmd-G, Get Path, etc.) that did not involve dismissing QS. I can't think, of the top of my head, of which actions automatically repopulate the first pane with their result and keep QS active. I take it that these are all going to be actions that one might wish to daisy chain together with other actions. But I suspect I often "break the chain" and decide to search for something else instead (or drill around with arrows on the result). When I use "Move To...", for example, I usually don't go on to do something else to the moved file. Also, the current behavior feels "consistent" to me (but that may just be the result of habit), and I worry that the proposed behavior would not feel as consistent. I don't want to have to pay attention to the details of how I got where I am, and I don't want to have to look before knowing whether hitting tab is going to move me from the first pane to the second or the second to the first... David
