Not sure what the status of the "Search" button is, is the plan for it to be implemented in other search modals too, or is it just a one-off? Do you think it would make sense to add it (as an option) to the SearchModal?

Also, the query won't be cleared if you manually remove text in the textbox (compared to clicking the X button) which I think I would find confusing.

Not sure what the status of the "Search" button is, is the plan for it to be implemented in other search modals too, or is it just a one-off? Do you think it would make sense to add it (as an option) to the SearchModal?

Initially I implemented it like this, but because we want to remember the query in the context, using SearchModal made the code so complex, it was unreasonable. This modal is different from other search modals in that it fetches information from the server, not from redux, and it stores some information in the context. So I think it is reasonable that it requires a different implementation.
The search button is needed for this reason - that we are fetching results from the server, and that our message search is a fulltext search (meaning we cannot find words by their prefix or other part), which is not the case with our other searches

Also, the query won't be cleared if you manually remove text in the textbox (compared to clicking the X button) which I think I would find confusing.

I will bring this up with Ted, but it does make sense to me personally

Makes sense, thanks for explaining