I'm afraid that I don't think there's a way to make Splunk's core "search" view always open in the Events tab. What the view uses to make the determination is the nature of the search itself. If the search is just a raw search or if it contains only streaming and non-transforming search commands, then the search will open in the events tab. On the other hand if it has a transforming command like "stats" or "timechart" or even a non-streaming command like "| table *", then it will open in the "Statistics" tab.
What could be added to Sideview Utils, is a special key much like the special keys we already add, like $results.sid$ or $results.doneProgress$, that would be $results.eventSearch$. This could report the "eventSearch" property from the dispatched job. Splunk actually records the non-streaming transforming portion of the search into this property, and we could make it available for this kind of use case. In this case, instead of
<param name="arg.q">search $search$</param>
you would have
<param name="arg.q">$results.eventSearch$</param>
This would discard any commands like stats/timechart that are non-streaming commands and then the search would open in the events tab. Like the other $results.*$ keys, it would only be defined once the UI had actually received information back from the server, so for certain use cases where you need the information only moments after the search dispatches, it won't be there.
