[hydrozen]

I find that using the search of xbmc is not very quick enough (not the search itself, but using the UI to do the search), requiring to go to the side menu and mess around with a bunch of controls. I’d really love it if there was some kind of launcher/quick search kinda menu like alfredapp.com or spotlight or the cmd-p and cmd-t commands of Sublime Text so that I could quickly get to a UI with a keyboard shortcut and do some fuzzy search on the name of a tv show for example, or the name of a movie and be able to navigate to or open a result. I think that would make navigating xbmc with a keyboard much quicker.

[Rantanplan-1]

Not shure if this is what you've been after, but:
Confluence -> Globalsearch Addon

you can use the keymap.xml to guiede the button which you like to the search-dialogue.

Regards