With bug 160194 we have additional access to the spotlight options from the Styles Inspector. But annoyingly toggling the option via Format > Spotlight (and likely also per shortcut) changes the view to the Stylist. Happens also when the sidebar is closed, eg. when using the Notebookbar.
Hmm, yes. But isn't that intended. Toggle from the menu and expose the Stylist <F11> to "adjust" the style/DF as indicated from the SB deck. Then toggle it off to get back to writing? Moving SB deck focus to the Stylist deck makes sense for work flows that make use of the spotlight. Only aspect of it that is questionable is that when unchecking one of the Format -> Spotlight controls, it changes focus to the corresponding content panel in the SB. So no concern with SB change when enabling the Spotlight on, just a bit awkward when disabling from the menu--but on the whole it seems fine.
The way paragraph and character styles spotlight is implemented requires the sidebar to be open and the styles deck to be present but not necessarily selected. Here is a patch makes the styles deck not be switch to when turning spotlight on and off from Menu > Format > Spotlight or from a shortcut key unless the sidebar is not already open. The patch also fixes the Spotlight check button state in the Styles deck not being updated when spotlight is changed in the Styles Inspector deck: https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/183694 If interested in testing this patch it is built on top of https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/183693/1 so that will also need to be applied.
Jim Raykowski committed a patch related to this issue. It has been pushed to "master": https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/b5e366c97d813c65d477941d45ae55f7dff954ad tdf#165998 Spotlight switches the view to the Stylist It will be available in 25.8.0. The patch should be included in the daily builds available at https://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/ in the next 24-48 hours. More information about daily builds can be found at: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Testing_Daily_Builds Affected users are encouraged to test the fix and report feedback.
UI is nice and stable now, more reasonable. TB, and SB Styles deck selection in synce without the UI jumps. Thanks Jim! 2025-04-06 TB78wix build Version: 25.8.0.0.alpha0+ (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community Build ID: b5e366c97d813c65d477941d45ae55f7dff954ad CPU threads: 28; OS: Windows 11 X86_64 (build 26100); UI render: Skia/Vulkan; VCL: win Locale: en-US (en_US); UI: en-US Calc: CL threaded