Hey David,
I checked the Punch commands yesterday, and they were correct. I think I already made some edits for these back in August. Makes sense, since the OP is from July.
To clear the search result pop-up, you can use the ESC key, or click the toolbar in which the search field resides. I just checked on recent versions of Safari, Chrome and Firefox.
I agree, clicking the background should work too, along with going through the search results with the arrow keys (doesn't work yet - but the pull requests for this to work have been made on Github!).
Cheers