Every keystroke in the Gnome Activities search bar opens a new terminal

I've been experiencing this weird behaviour for about a month and a half -- Every time a key is pressed within the Activities search bar of Gnome, a new Terminator tab is opened.

For instance, if I press (and release) the Super key, then type "hello", I will have a Terminator window with five new tabs (actually, not always five if I type fast enough - it seems to fire only at intervals while I type).

It must somehow be linked to my recent efforts to get the Calculator multimedia key of my keyboard mapped to terminator --new-tab instead of being mapped to opening the calculator app. However, despite removing all terminal-related keyboard shortcuts from my Gnome settings, the problem persists.

I don't remember exactly how I had attempted my Calculator key remap, but I do remember that I had eventually succeeded, perhaps by using CLI methods (I remember trying several recipes found on various forums, some of which involved gsettings), so there might be a clue there as to what happened.

I finally found the cause of my problem.

I had overriden the default "gnome-calculator" by creating ~/.local/bin/gnome-calculator with the following contents:

#!/bin/bash
terminator --new-tab

I did this because Gnome wouldn't let me customize the keyboard shortcut for my keyboard's "calculator" key (which, by default, starts gnome-calculator).

I was unaware that gnome-calculator is not just the GUI, but also serves as the back-end for instant results when you type something in the Activities search (e.g. when you type "3+4" in the search bar, it calls gnome-calculator --solve "3+4", which doesn't open the GUI but just echoes the result if it recognizes the expression).

So what I will do now is alter my gnome-calculator script: if called with --solve, it will just be a proxy to /usr/bin/gnome-calculator, otherwise, I will have it open a terminal.