If you want to use powertoys run, i highly recommend the plugin for everything here. [1]
Everything [2] is an indexer that will make finding your local files super fast.
If you couple those two, you have a launcher that is able to find all files on your drive very fast (and launch applications of course).
Good suggestion! I long didn't use Everything out of SSD wear concerns, adding yet another indexer to Windows.
Then got the idea that you can of course simply disable Windows Search Indexer service, and Windows gracefully accepts that. Sure, a few integrated search methods like in Explorer or Start Menu stop working or as efficiently but Windows will then tell you when, and you just adapt to using Everything instead.
So I did, and it's just SO much more efficient at both keeping the index updated and finding my files thanks to being MFT based rather than walking through the file system.
>I long didn't use Everything out of SSD wear concerns
How grounded in reality are your SSD wear concerns? I feel like most people are overly paranoid and have unfounded FUD about that.
I use my SSD like a loaner (constantly installing new games and downloading new linux ISOs to try out in VMs) and after 2 years of heavy use it had IIRC ~98% life remaining in SMART statistics. I bought another second hand corporate laptop used for 4 years and the SSD SMART reports a remaining life of 97%.
So unless you want to leave your SSD as inheritance to your grandkids, I don't see the point of hypermiling your SSD to increase longevity. It's a wearable part, it's gonna die eventually no matter how much you baby it, so I might as well use it to the max to get my money's worth, otherwise what's the point? It's not like it's gonna increase in value over time the less you use it like Pokémon cards.
I would be more concerned with a small SSD with limited available storage... But I've generally just treated SSD/NVME like yourself and not really worried about it.
I did experience a bug in the first gen Intel SSD that one day it showed up as an 8mb drive, didn't know of the fix for it until well later, and it was so small (64gb) that I just swapped it for a larger/cheaper drive by that time.
I also experienced some issues with another drive I replaced a few months ago, that turned out to be an issue with RAM. Again, swapped the 2tb drive for 4tb as I wanted more storage as well.
Other than these, I haven't worn out a drive yet. I have decade old SSDs from an old home server from 12 years ago currently running in RPi boxes via usb-sata adapters.
FYI the Everything alpha 1.5 (dont quote me on that ) I believe uses the Master File Tree (MFT) and absolutely blows stable branch Everything out of the water
It seems the sibling commenters don't know about the DisableSearchBoxSuggestions registry option, which I highly recommend keyboard users of Windows to set up on every system they work with.
When the setting is applied the start menu will go back to the old behavior where results appear instantly and always point to your local machine. I'm sure dedicated launchers can do an even better job for deep searches, but personally I've never found myself particularly slowed down by the built-in behavior after disabling that borked web search functionality.
For me is 10X faster and it finds what I need. For example if I search for "power" it shows powerautomate (why??) , powerpoint, powershell in this order. No powertoys. Also if I dont have internet it takes ages before it shows somethig in search. Yea it's much more usefull.
Komorebi is quite good, although it has it quirks with some applications that spawn child processes.
Make sure to make yourself familiar with application specific configs, there's already a whole community-driven config for that [1]. But all in all it's very beginner friendly, since it does enable you to float windows still (and pause komorebi).
Consider Ctrl + Space in Windows Explorer. For literal decades, it has been the method for selecting multiple nonsequential files. Now it is the default shortcut for the Peek file preview window. But it doesn't have the title PowerToys or Peek. It's just the filename of whatever gets opened. So now you have two problems: figure out why you can't select multiple files in Explorer like you did last week and last year and ten years ago; and figure out how to disable this mystery preview window so it doesn't keep happening.
Hopefully the first time you discover Peek, you aren't trying to delete a subset of sensitive documents in a shared space without using the mouse. But that's okay; the lead dev states PowerToys is an incubator, and that justifies enabling new features by default, so sensitive files should get previewed using Ctrl + Space without warning! (Only that last part is mine.)
The tools are too opinionated for the amount of productivity they claim to provide. (Yeah, even Quick Accent. I'll stick with my insecure AHK script. At least it only activates when I ask for it.)
Depends on what you do/need I guess. Overall I'd rate the ones I use rather usefule. I use Run and FancyZones every single day. To the point that it's annoying to not have them when I'm on another computer. The others which I have enabled (because I use them often enough) are e.g Text Extractor, Color Picker, Screen Ruler.
You can get going with komorebi in less than 10 minutes[1] following the quickstart guide. Once you have it running, this bookmark[2] will be your best friend to get familiar with the suggested configuration before you start making your own personalized tweaks.
I've been using GlazeWM (https://github.com/glzr-io/glazewm) for a bit now and have been enjoying it. I only use it for very basic window-tiling and its going through a re-write atm
I would rather like to see a file explorer launcher such as Listary [1]. The ability to quickly navigate to files and folders is much more important to me than launching apps.
A key difference with Everything is it's not a weighted search, it just returns all matches sorted in whatever column is active, so less useful as a launcher (though a tip: if you press Enter it will skip to the most previously clicked result).
While the programs from this thread (at least those I'm familiar with) score results by relevancy.
I'm actually working on a sideproject right now that can work as a Windows Explorer replacement with Everything as an indexer in the background. Among other things, this provides advantages such as that you can create virtual folders in the operating system that are based on everything queries. The latest thing I'm working on right now is being able to use plain text for searches by having an LLM AI translate plain text into everything queries. Feel free to check out the project at https://thefile.ninja or check the predemo video: https://youtu.be/JREufgkf5pk
I find it interesting that, to my knowledge, launcher/assistant tools like this aren't common on platforms other than macOS.
Windows has had one or two that I've seen, but not common, and I don't hear every Windows user swearing by them. Linux has GnomeDo, but I found it lacking, and again I haven't heard people swearing by them. ChromeOS has one I think, but I can't remember the name, and again it doesn't seem popular.
macOS on the other hand has had Quicksilver, Launchbar, Alfred, and Raycast, to name just those that I've personally used, and Spotlight has been built in to macOS for a long time, with a launcher/utility interface for many years. I've also heard many people (at least in techie/knowledge worker circles) using them, and have met strong proponents of all of these options.
Is this difference just down to my lack of knowledge of other platforms, or is there a grain of truth to this? If so, why? What makes macOS conducive to this (is it that these are all built on Spotlight and therefore can exist easily), and do users just demand this more on macOS?
I'm not sure there's a point to building launchers like this on Windows, since you can just open start menu and start typing straight away to find what you want. In addition to the standard search (admittedly not great in Windows 11 unless you kill Bing via regedit) there is Win-R to get the popup for running apps when you know the binary name, Win-I to open new Settings app with context-sensitive search, Win-X to get the admin menu with all the usual keyboard shortcuts, Win-T to quickly navigate the task bar, etc.
I always got the impression the reason MacOS has all these different third-party launchers and window managers is because the in-built functionality for keyboard-based navigation is so bad.
Start Menu and type away is a Windows... 10? 8? (Edit: Vista) addition. They had these launchers for Windows XP (OS X introduced them, and Windows devs copied the idea)
Start menu search will launch Edge+Bing rather than what you want if you make a typo. Also, not sure if fixed but in some older Win10 setup, search is non-deterministic (typing the same letter leads to different result. Though it's the same 95% of the time).
dmenu and rofi/tofi are pretty popular on Linux, especially with tiling window manager users. I use tofi with sway, and it's blazing fast compared to Spotlight (but Spotlight is searching a lot more things at once). They also take stdin, so you can hook them up to all sorts of things (eg. ssh hosts, clipboard history, password manager entries, etc.)
On Windows, these tools are ‘app launchers’. They launch an instance of an app whether or not you have one already open.
On Mac, they’re ’app switchers’. They’ll launch an app, or switch to its running instance if there is one.
I dare say that this reflects the way that the Mac and Windows handle apps and processes. Either way, it makes this sort of thing singularly useless on Windows.
It might be useful to launch Outlook once, in the morning. But after that, launching more instances of Outlook is absurd. I want to switch to Outlook.
I don’t think Windows users really understand how useful these tools are as switchers; just how much faster it is to Cmd-Space, s[afari], return, and have your browser pop to the front. I should time it. If that took me more than about 100ms I’d be stunned, because I’ve done it dozens of times a day for well over a decade.
Edit: timed it. 375ms from the first sound of me pressing the space bar until Safari is on-screen. 200ms of my action, and another 175ms waiting for Safari to appear.
The feature in powertoys run is called Window Walker and has, in some way, been in every launcher I’ve ever used. I don’t think Mac users really understand that many of their fancy features are also a thing on other operating systems.
I like having the option to start a new instance (as apps also have the option of handling that, e.g. my text editor opens a new text tab if I launch it while it’s already open) or switching to an open app.
Apple does do a good job of packaging their stuff.
For example, Time Machine, which didn’t really do anything other OSes didn’t, but Apple integrated it into their universal preview system and gave it a nice fun and easy to use interface along with making it easy to setup on install.
In Windows you had to dig into a tab on the rt-click properties menu and the best you could do was find previous versions by date, and I’m still not clear on how you enabled/disabled Previous versions on install.
Of course, Time Machinenis also a great example of how Apple often overemphasizes aesthetics at the cost of actual function, where Time Machine is notorious about being extremely flaky about actually restoring from backup (to be fair, I was among the “lucky” people who’ve only had positive experiences with Time Machine, including a full restore).
This is indeed the main thing I use Spotlight/Alfred for on MacOS: I want to go to the window for this app, regardless of what virtual desktop it's on, and I don't want to hunt for it.
I use that "text-based finder" approach _everywhere_:
- Telescope in NeoVim (https://github.com/nvim-telescope/telescope.nvim)
- The "Actions" (Cmd-Shift-A) and "Find Anything" (Shift-Shift) shortcuts in IntelliJ
- Alfred on my work macbook
- KRunner on my personal linux laptop (with KDE)
- The `t` shortcut on github to jump to files
- the `!` "bang" shortcuts on DuckDuckGo
I have the hardcore vim brainworms of "don't make me touch the mouse", and in _spades_ if that mouse is a laptop trackpad.
I haven't found a good equivalent on Windows, not because they don't exist, but because they're all focused on trying to do everything _but_ launch fast and swap to the application I want...so they wind up taking 4-5 seconds between "hit keyboard shortcut that invokes it" and "start typing", because they're busy indexing the registry or my recycle bin or whatever.
In Windows every app gets a number corresponding to its position in the task bar, which you can pin if you like, and then you just hit Windows button and the number to instantly open or switch.
This is a common response whenever I talk about this, and I don’t find it compelling. (Sorry.)
Windows+1..6 is a terrible keyboard shortcut as they’re both on the fingers of the left hand.
You’re limited to 9 apps, and good luck to your muscle memory if you ever change one of them.
You’re limited to apps. Alfred will open files, URLs, individual setting pages, it’ll send an email, launch a Terminal at your current file system folder … the list goes on.
I assume that many Windows people have never seen a Mac user using Alfred (or Launchbar or Raycast or whatever). You should. :-)
Windows and Linux users have had to put up with decades of tedious lectures and cheerleading from Apple fans who think their tool is faster/better/sexier than everyone else's, never mind the fact that their UNIX-based OS still doesn't ship in a usable configuration for keyboard-centric users.
Like most developers, I have been forced to use a Mac at work in several jobs, and each time I've faffed about with dozens of "productivity" tools that claim to solve the user interface limitations of the base OS - all of which felt about as rewarding as spending months tweaking custom vim configs - instead of just getting on with the actual job I was paid to do.
If you primarily use a keyboard, but you also need a GUI, Windows just works out of the box. It's not cool, it's not stylish, but it does the job. I have nothing against Mac users who enjoy customizing their systems, but please understand that many Windows power users have been there, done that, and decided that what we get out of the box is good enough for the vast majority of work we need to do on a daily basis.
For me it's not really worth my time to customize a system just to save a few hundred milliseconds in the unusual situation where I am running a completely different suite of applications every day, and I always have more than ten of them open, and I can't use my left hand for some reason, and I want to deep link a scripted shortcut into an app instead of just switching to that app and using a standard shortcut, or whatever. In my job, at least, I spend far longer reading code and thinking about the problem than trying to open a terminal, switch apps or send an email.
I do miss the Windows ~NT/2000 every-word-has-an-underlined-letter-that-you-can-use-with-the-alt-key era. Last time I used Windows (10) that felt like it was going away? Vestiges exist but they’re no longer so obvious?
Because that was/is a tremendously simple and effective way to get around, no doubt.
In the 00s there were a lot of them for Windows, since OSX introduced them and Windows devs tried to duplicate them. Some were really awful, needing a lot of time to render the prompt window (it was the age of the spinning disk, if that's an excuse). I've been running https://www.donationcoder.com/software/mouser/popular-apps/f... for maybe 20 years..
PopOS and SteamOS have this out of the box, hit the Windows key (or whatever the genericized icon is on your keyboard) to bring it up. On SteamOS it brings up the Start menu equivalent and on PopOS it brings up a lightweight UI like in the OP, but both are fuzzy-searching application launchers. I assume the same thing is standard on other Linux distros, those are just the ones I have on hand.
It's not that macOS is conducive to third party launchers, it's that you need these other launchers to replicate the the basic functionality that is built into the Windows launcher.
There aren't as many third party launchers for Windows because it already does 99% of what you want it to do, and the remaining 1% are features, not competitors.
Slickrun on windows was pretty handy back in the day. It was made by Eric Lawrence who also made fiddler. I believe he was an MS Employee on IE, then moved to google to work on chrome and came back to Microsoft to work on Edge. Clever chap.
Could it be due to the high percentage of Macs being used by devs compared to Windows and the fact that Mac software typically puts more focus on UI, even for developer-focused tools, compared to Linux?
>due to the high percentage of Macs being used by devs compared to Windows
Depends where. Where I live, most IT and development jobs are on windows and globally speaking the picture seems to be the same. Mac dominating SW development work seems mostly a SV/US thing.
I was implying more that among Mac users, the percentage of devs is significantly higher than among Windows users. I'd assume the same is true for higher cost PCs vs entry level as well.
That aside, Macs are definitely overrepresented outside of SV/US as well, being from EU myself, I don't think I remember a single office I've visited over the last 10 years in a number of countries that didn't look like an Apple store. Granted India/China alone are populous enough to dictate global statistics.
> I don't think I remember a single office I've visited over the last 10 years in a number of countries that didn't look like an Apple store
I guess it depends what type of companies you visit. I'm also from near Germany and zero companies i visited in the last 10 years looked like an Apple store. It was all Windows. If you only go to fancy Berlin/Münch startups I can imagine it's all Apple but that's more of a bubble even nation wide. Statistically Windows still has a majority in most companies.
Isn't the main start menu already a quick launcher?
My experience on windows in the last decade is limited but every time I used a windows 10 machine, the windows key followed with whatever keyword would act as a launcher. Or am I missing something obvious? Did they remove start menu from win 11?
>Isn't the main start menu already a quick launcher?
That was my first thought as well. I haven't really used Windows all that much since Windows 7, but at least then I found the start menu to work a lot better than anything we have in Linux land.
Simply press <Win> and type out what you need, be it some application or a system setting you want to change.
The functionality has sadly gone significantly downhill since Windows 7 - which I concur worked quite well, type 2-3 letters and press enter and the obvious thing usually launched. Nowadays mostly I just get a prompt to search something on Bing which will of course disregard my browser preference and launch edge. Not that I ever want the start menu to launch a search anyway...
This (awful) behavior can be disabled with a one line registry tweak, after which Windows 10 and 11 start menus more or less work the same as in previous versions. Search for DisableSearchBoxSuggestions.
It works as long as you previously configured it properly (by default it shows websearches), and don’t need many configuration options or features in general. For most users it’s enough, power users might want more.
The one feature that keeps me on KeyPirinha over PowerToys Run is the ability to configure and launch portable apps from specific locations (and subdirectories).
I strongly suspect that 'Run has the feature, but I cannot for the life of me find it.
Beyond that they mostly occupy the same space, with 'Run slightly faster to popup (and by slight I mean measured in mS).
Having tested all launchers which are available on earth I settled with fluentsearch. Most capable launcher of them all and also works with everything(although the internal indexer is also incredible powerful)
PowerToys Run is more featureful than Spotlight and should be compared to Alfred or Raycast. Basically, the biggest differentiator is whether you can write a custom plugin for it or not.
A lot of Mac users are oblivious to anything outside the Apple ecosystem. To them Steve Jobs basically invented sliced bread and everything else is a copy. Good thing the industry didn't also copy Apple's OOTB window management.
If you want to use powertoys run, i highly recommend the plugin for everything here. [1]
Everything [2] is an indexer that will make finding your local files super fast. If you couple those two, you have a launcher that is able to find all files on your drive very fast (and launch applications of course).
[1] https://github.com/lin-ycv/EverythingPowerToys [2] https://www.voidtools.com/
Good suggestion! I long didn't use Everything out of SSD wear concerns, adding yet another indexer to Windows.
Then got the idea that you can of course simply disable Windows Search Indexer service, and Windows gracefully accepts that. Sure, a few integrated search methods like in Explorer or Start Menu stop working or as efficiently but Windows will then tell you when, and you just adapt to using Everything instead.
So I did, and it's just SO much more efficient at both keeping the index updated and finding my files thanks to being MFT based rather than walking through the file system.
>I long didn't use Everything out of SSD wear concerns
How grounded in reality are your SSD wear concerns? I feel like most people are overly paranoid and have unfounded FUD about that.
I use my SSD like a loaner (constantly installing new games and downloading new linux ISOs to try out in VMs) and after 2 years of heavy use it had IIRC ~98% life remaining in SMART statistics. I bought another second hand corporate laptop used for 4 years and the SSD SMART reports a remaining life of 97%.
So unless you want to leave your SSD as inheritance to your grandkids, I don't see the point of hypermiling your SSD to increase longevity. It's a wearable part, it's gonna die eventually no matter how much you baby it, so I might as well use it to the max to get my money's worth, otherwise what's the point? It's not like it's gonna increase in value over time the less you use it like Pokémon cards.
I would be more concerned with a small SSD with limited available storage... But I've generally just treated SSD/NVME like yourself and not really worried about it.
I did experience a bug in the first gen Intel SSD that one day it showed up as an 8mb drive, didn't know of the fix for it until well later, and it was so small (64gb) that I just swapped it for a larger/cheaper drive by that time.
I also experienced some issues with another drive I replaced a few months ago, that turned out to be an issue with RAM. Again, swapped the 2tb drive for 4tb as I wanted more storage as well.
Other than these, I haven't worn out a drive yet. I have decade old SSDs from an old home server from 12 years ago currently running in RPi boxes via usb-sata adapters.
FYI the Everything alpha 1.5 (dont quote me on that ) I believe uses the Master File Tree (MFT) and absolutely blows stable branch Everything out of the water
What's the difference between this and the search bar in the start menu?
It seems the sibling commenters don't know about the DisableSearchBoxSuggestions registry option, which I highly recommend keyboard users of Windows to set up on every system they work with.
When the setting is applied the start menu will go back to the old behavior where results appear instantly and always point to your local machine. I'm sure dedicated launchers can do an even better job for deep searches, but personally I've never found myself particularly slowed down by the built-in behavior after disabling that borked web search functionality.
For me is 10X faster and it finds what I need. For example if I search for "power" it shows powerautomate (why??) , powerpoint, powershell in this order. No powertoys. Also if I dont have internet it takes ages before it shows somethig in search. Yea it's much more usefull.
Everything works always and searches everything.
Windows start... I don' t even know if search works or file not found. And is way slower.
Everything is instant and doesn’t piss about with internet results. Just what’s on your local system
It actually works
The whole PowerToys suite looks useful. I'm trying to find some time to get familiar with it all.
Also want to get going with komorebi (https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi) as I've looked at the Linux tiling window managers for years with envy.
Komorebi is quite good, although it has it quirks with some applications that spawn child processes. Make sure to make yourself familiar with application specific configs, there's already a whole community-driven config for that [1]. But all in all it's very beginner friendly, since it does enable you to float windows still (and pause komorebi).
[1] https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi-application-specific-conf...
It does look useful at first but once you get familiar with it, you will see it actually is not that useful.
PowerToys can be counterproductive.
Consider Ctrl + Space in Windows Explorer. For literal decades, it has been the method for selecting multiple nonsequential files. Now it is the default shortcut for the Peek file preview window. But it doesn't have the title PowerToys or Peek. It's just the filename of whatever gets opened. So now you have two problems: figure out why you can't select multiple files in Explorer like you did last week and last year and ten years ago; and figure out how to disable this mystery preview window so it doesn't keep happening.
Hopefully the first time you discover Peek, you aren't trying to delete a subset of sensitive documents in a shared space without using the mouse. But that's okay; the lead dev states PowerToys is an incubator, and that justifies enabling new features by default, so sensitive files should get previewed using Ctrl + Space without warning! (Only that last part is mine.)
The tools are too opinionated for the amount of productivity they claim to provide. (Yeah, even Quick Accent. I'll stick with my insecure AHK script. At least it only activates when I ask for it.)
Depends on what you do/need I guess. Overall I'd rate the ones I use rather usefule. I use Run and FancyZones every single day. To the point that it's annoying to not have them when I'm on another computer. The others which I have enabled (because I use them often enough) are e.g Text Extractor, Color Picker, Screen Ruler.
You can get going with komorebi in less than 10 minutes[1] following the quickstart guide. Once you have it running, this bookmark[2] will be your best friend to get familiar with the suggested configuration before you start making your own personalized tweaks.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9-_c1egQ4g the video was actually 7 minutes but a lot of that was me explaining each step
[2]: https://lgug2z.github.io/komorebi/example-configurations.htm...
I've been using GlazeWM (https://github.com/glzr-io/glazewm) for a bit now and have been enjoying it. I only use it for very basic window-tiling and its going through a re-write atm
> The whole PowerToys suite looks useful.
The old one was. The new one, not so much.
I would rather like to see a file explorer launcher such as Listary [1]. The ability to quickly navigate to files and folders is much more important to me than launching apps.
[1] https://www.listary.com/
Everything [1] used to be the pretty good for this on Windows. Have you tried it out?
1. https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/
A key difference with Everything is it's not a weighted search, it just returns all matches sorted in whatever column is active, so less useful as a launcher (though a tip: if you press Enter it will skip to the most previously clicked result).
While the programs from this thread (at least those I'm familiar with) score results by relevancy.
>...used to be...
Still is 'pretty good' - I'd say 'above excellent', especially the portable version.
I'm actually working on a sideproject right now that can work as a Windows Explorer replacement with Everything as an indexer in the background. Among other things, this provides advantages such as that you can create virtual folders in the operating system that are based on everything queries. The latest thing I'm working on right now is being able to use plain text for searches by having an LLM AI translate plain text into everything queries. Feel free to check out the project at https://thefile.ninja or check the predemo video: https://youtu.be/JREufgkf5pk
I find it interesting that, to my knowledge, launcher/assistant tools like this aren't common on platforms other than macOS.
Windows has had one or two that I've seen, but not common, and I don't hear every Windows user swearing by them. Linux has GnomeDo, but I found it lacking, and again I haven't heard people swearing by them. ChromeOS has one I think, but I can't remember the name, and again it doesn't seem popular.
macOS on the other hand has had Quicksilver, Launchbar, Alfred, and Raycast, to name just those that I've personally used, and Spotlight has been built in to macOS for a long time, with a launcher/utility interface for many years. I've also heard many people (at least in techie/knowledge worker circles) using them, and have met strong proponents of all of these options.
Is this difference just down to my lack of knowledge of other platforms, or is there a grain of truth to this? If so, why? What makes macOS conducive to this (is it that these are all built on Spotlight and therefore can exist easily), and do users just demand this more on macOS?
I'm not sure there's a point to building launchers like this on Windows, since you can just open start menu and start typing straight away to find what you want. In addition to the standard search (admittedly not great in Windows 11 unless you kill Bing via regedit) there is Win-R to get the popup for running apps when you know the binary name, Win-I to open new Settings app with context-sensitive search, Win-X to get the admin menu with all the usual keyboard shortcuts, Win-T to quickly navigate the task bar, etc.
I always got the impression the reason MacOS has all these different third-party launchers and window managers is because the in-built functionality for keyboard-based navigation is so bad.
Start Menu and type away is a Windows... 10? 8? (Edit: Vista) addition. They had these launchers for Windows XP (OS X introduced them, and Windows devs copied the idea)
Start menu search will launch Edge+Bing rather than what you want if you make a typo. Also, not sure if fixed but in some older Win10 setup, search is non-deterministic (typing the same letter leads to different result. Though it's the same 95% of the time).
dmenu and rofi/tofi are pretty popular on Linux, especially with tiling window manager users. I use tofi with sway, and it's blazing fast compared to Spotlight (but Spotlight is searching a lot more things at once). They also take stdin, so you can hook them up to all sorts of things (eg. ssh hosts, clipboard history, password manager entries, etc.)
KRunner [1] on Plasma is pretty awesome. Plenty of plugins available [2] and it's also very useful out of the box on most distributions.
[1] https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/Krunner
[2] https://store.kde.org/browse?cat=628
On Windows, these tools are ‘app launchers’. They launch an instance of an app whether or not you have one already open.
On Mac, they’re ’app switchers’. They’ll launch an app, or switch to its running instance if there is one.
I dare say that this reflects the way that the Mac and Windows handle apps and processes. Either way, it makes this sort of thing singularly useless on Windows.
It might be useful to launch Outlook once, in the morning. But after that, launching more instances of Outlook is absurd. I want to switch to Outlook.
I don’t think Windows users really understand how useful these tools are as switchers; just how much faster it is to Cmd-Space, s[afari], return, and have your browser pop to the front. I should time it. If that took me more than about 100ms I’d be stunned, because I’ve done it dozens of times a day for well over a decade.
Edit: timed it. 375ms from the first sound of me pressing the space bar until Safari is on-screen. 200ms of my action, and another 175ms waiting for Safari to appear.
The feature in powertoys run is called Window Walker and has, in some way, been in every launcher I’ve ever used. I don’t think Mac users really understand that many of their fancy features are also a thing on other operating systems.
I like having the option to start a new instance (as apps also have the option of handling that, e.g. my text editor opens a new text tab if I launch it while it’s already open) or switching to an open app.
Apple does do a good job of packaging their stuff.
For example, Time Machine, which didn’t really do anything other OSes didn’t, but Apple integrated it into their universal preview system and gave it a nice fun and easy to use interface along with making it easy to setup on install.
In Windows you had to dig into a tab on the rt-click properties menu and the best you could do was find previous versions by date, and I’m still not clear on how you enabled/disabled Previous versions on install.
Of course, Time Machinenis also a great example of how Apple often overemphasizes aesthetics at the cost of actual function, where Time Machine is notorious about being extremely flaky about actually restoring from backup (to be fair, I was among the “lucky” people who’ve only had positive experiences with Time Machine, including a full restore).
This is indeed the main thing I use Spotlight/Alfred for on MacOS: I want to go to the window for this app, regardless of what virtual desktop it's on, and I don't want to hunt for it.
I use that "text-based finder" approach _everywhere_:
I have the hardcore vim brainworms of "don't make me touch the mouse", and in _spades_ if that mouse is a laptop trackpad.I haven't found a good equivalent on Windows, not because they don't exist, but because they're all focused on trying to do everything _but_ launch fast and swap to the application I want...so they wind up taking 4-5 seconds between "hit keyboard shortcut that invokes it" and "start typing", because they're busy indexing the registry or my recycle bin or whatever.
In Windows every app gets a number corresponding to its position in the task bar, which you can pin if you like, and then you just hit Windows button and the number to instantly open or switch.
This is a common response whenever I talk about this, and I don’t find it compelling. (Sorry.)
Windows+1..6 is a terrible keyboard shortcut as they’re both on the fingers of the left hand.
You’re limited to 9 apps, and good luck to your muscle memory if you ever change one of them.
You’re limited to apps. Alfred will open files, URLs, individual setting pages, it’ll send an email, launch a Terminal at your current file system folder … the list goes on.
I assume that many Windows people have never seen a Mac user using Alfred (or Launchbar or Raycast or whatever). You should. :-)
Please don't be condescending.
Windows and Linux users have had to put up with decades of tedious lectures and cheerleading from Apple fans who think their tool is faster/better/sexier than everyone else's, never mind the fact that their UNIX-based OS still doesn't ship in a usable configuration for keyboard-centric users.
Like most developers, I have been forced to use a Mac at work in several jobs, and each time I've faffed about with dozens of "productivity" tools that claim to solve the user interface limitations of the base OS - all of which felt about as rewarding as spending months tweaking custom vim configs - instead of just getting on with the actual job I was paid to do.
If you primarily use a keyboard, but you also need a GUI, Windows just works out of the box. It's not cool, it's not stylish, but it does the job. I have nothing against Mac users who enjoy customizing their systems, but please understand that many Windows power users have been there, done that, and decided that what we get out of the box is good enough for the vast majority of work we need to do on a daily basis.
For me it's not really worth my time to customize a system just to save a few hundred milliseconds in the unusual situation where I am running a completely different suite of applications every day, and I always have more than ten of them open, and I can't use my left hand for some reason, and I want to deep link a scripted shortcut into an app instead of just switching to that app and using a standard shortcut, or whatever. In my job, at least, I spend far longer reading code and thinking about the problem than trying to open a terminal, switch apps or send an email.
I’m sorry, I was condescending. My bad.
I do miss the Windows ~NT/2000 every-word-has-an-underlined-letter-that-you-can-use-with-the-alt-key era. Last time I used Windows (10) that felt like it was going away? Vestiges exist but they’re no longer so obvious?
Because that was/is a tremendously simple and effective way to get around, no doubt.
In the 00s there were a lot of them for Windows, since OSX introduced them and Windows devs tried to duplicate them. Some were really awful, needing a lot of time to render the prompt window (it was the age of the spinning disk, if that's an excuse). I've been running https://www.donationcoder.com/software/mouser/popular-apps/f... for maybe 20 years..
PopOS and SteamOS have this out of the box, hit the Windows key (or whatever the genericized icon is on your keyboard) to bring it up. On SteamOS it brings up the Start menu equivalent and on PopOS it brings up a lightweight UI like in the OP, but both are fuzzy-searching application launchers. I assume the same thing is standard on other Linux distros, those are just the ones I have on hand.
It's not that macOS is conducive to third party launchers, it's that you need these other launchers to replicate the the basic functionality that is built into the Windows launcher.
There aren't as many third party launchers for Windows because it already does 99% of what you want it to do, and the remaining 1% are features, not competitors.
Slickrun on windows was pretty handy back in the day. It was made by Eric Lawrence who also made fiddler. I believe he was an MS Employee on IE, then moved to google to work on chrome and came back to Microsoft to work on Edge. Clever chap.
Could it be due to the high percentage of Macs being used by devs compared to Windows and the fact that Mac software typically puts more focus on UI, even for developer-focused tools, compared to Linux?
>due to the high percentage of Macs being used by devs compared to Windows
Depends where. Where I live, most IT and development jobs are on windows and globally speaking the picture seems to be the same. Mac dominating SW development work seems mostly a SV/US thing.
I was implying more that among Mac users, the percentage of devs is significantly higher than among Windows users. I'd assume the same is true for higher cost PCs vs entry level as well.
That aside, Macs are definitely overrepresented outside of SV/US as well, being from EU myself, I don't think I remember a single office I've visited over the last 10 years in a number of countries that didn't look like an Apple store. Granted India/China alone are populous enough to dictate global statistics.
> I don't think I remember a single office I've visited over the last 10 years in a number of countries that didn't look like an Apple store
I guess it depends what type of companies you visit. I'm also from near Germany and zero companies i visited in the last 10 years looked like an Apple store. It was all Windows. If you only go to fancy Berlin/Münch startups I can imagine it's all Apple but that's more of a bubble even nation wide. Statistically Windows still has a majority in most companies.
Back when I used Windows (maybe 20 years ago) I almost exclusively interacted with it through the win+R run dialogue.
With the right scripts, it could do anything -- and it was lightning quick!
Isn't the main start menu already a quick launcher?
My experience on windows in the last decade is limited but every time I used a windows 10 machine, the windows key followed with whatever keyword would act as a launcher. Or am I missing something obvious? Did they remove start menu from win 11?
>Isn't the main start menu already a quick launcher?
That was my first thought as well. I haven't really used Windows all that much since Windows 7, but at least then I found the start menu to work a lot better than anything we have in Linux land.
Simply press <Win> and type out what you need, be it some application or a system setting you want to change.
The functionality has sadly gone significantly downhill since Windows 7 - which I concur worked quite well, type 2-3 letters and press enter and the obvious thing usually launched. Nowadays mostly I just get a prompt to search something on Bing which will of course disregard my browser preference and launch edge. Not that I ever want the start menu to launch a search anyway...
This (awful) behavior can be disabled with a one line registry tweak, after which Windows 10 and 11 start menus more or less work the same as in previous versions. Search for DisableSearchBoxSuggestions.
It works as long as you previously configured it properly (by default it shows websearches), and don’t need many configuration options or features in general. For most users it’s enough, power users might want more.
It tends to search on Bing and open Edge on you rather than do what you want. Software should do what the user wants.
The one feature that keeps me on KeyPirinha over PowerToys Run is the ability to configure and launch portable apps from specific locations (and subdirectories).
I strongly suspect that 'Run has the feature, but I cannot for the life of me find it.
Beyond that they mostly occupy the same space, with 'Run slightly faster to popup (and by slight I mean measured in mS).
Having tested all launchers which are available on earth I settled with fluentsearch. Most capable launcher of them all and also works with everything(although the internal indexer is also incredible powerful)
It also comes with telemetry that one can’t disable
So, what the start menu search should be, before they added web results (and ads).
[dead]
So Microsoft just copied Spotlight?
PowerToys Run is more featureful than Spotlight and should be compared to Alfred or Raycast. Basically, the biggest differentiator is whether you can write a custom plugin for it or not.
This comment is pretty amusing, seeing as Apple "Sherlocked" Watson with the predecessor to Spotlight
It's a community project and Spotlight wasn't the first app launcher either.
A lot of Mac users are oblivious to anything outside the Apple ecosystem. To them Steve Jobs basically invented sliced bread and everything else is a copy. Good thing the industry didn't also copy Apple's OOTB window management.
You mean they both copied 9menu (1994) from Bell Labs?