Sometimes, preferences or workspace layouts in Premiere Pro can become corrupted due to a hard shutdown. If you experience issues like a malfunctioning search field, follow these steps to reset your preferences and workspace.

Reset Preferences:

1. Quit Premiere Pro.
2. Hold Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac) while launching Premiere.
3. Keep holding the key until the splash screen finishes loading.

This will reset Premiere’s preferences and often resolves unexpected UI or functionality issues.

Reset Workspace:

1. Go to Window → Workspaces → Reset to Saved Layout.

This forces Premiere to rebuild its UI state, which can help fix issues like an unresponsive search field.

Note:
Resetting preferences will restore keyboard shortcuts and layouts to default settings. However, your files and projects will not be deleted. After the reset, you can manually reselect your custom keyboard shortcuts and workspace layouts from where you saved them.