MacOS – Safari URL bar discoloration

The answer might simply be: You can't.

Whether or no this is desirable could be debated, but having worked on a couple of these things in Mozilla/Firefox days, I think it is clear that someone (aka Apple) would create a browser location opener-thingie to do it this way.

Here's why I think this is Safari expected behavior:

The match you are looking is a match to a Bookmarks and History via the Title. The URL is being provided for your convenience (or if you come from a certain period of browser design and/or security orientation, its to mitigate more obvious versions of URL spoofing). It isn't trying to present TITLE PLUS URL... because if it were a mult-mode search /bookmarks+history / location interface, that would not make any sense. (You could argue it could support this, but that's yet-another input syntax, and a whole other round of feature development...)

The URL is not mean to be editable text in this context.

I do think there is a bug which could be either:

The auto-completion shouldn't be implied with a normal selection color, because you can't trigger completion to make the editable text appear in the location field. (Nor does cut and paste operate correctly on this string).

Safari 8.0 does: Press and hold the Control key for a moment while you’re editing the location and you’ll see the search icon turn into an icon indicating that it’s interpreting the input as (part of) a URL instead of performing a search. The label “Search selected search engine” next to your text will change to “Go to Site” and the ‘Go to Site “your text”’ menu item in the completions list will be selected. Typing Control+Return will navigate there.

By the way, you can use Control+N (next) and Control+P (previous) to navigate through the completions list using the keyboard. (These are emacs-style navigation key bindings.)