The text box in the cinnamon menu is very convenient for quicklaunch and the fact that it allows substrings and selects automatically the most likely candidate is even more convenient.

It seems that since mint 20.2 something changed and the ordering of the applications and it can break…

Example : I open TeXstudio, when I want to open xed : I type xed¶ (the mouse pointer is of course nowhere near the menu)…