It's weird that there are no great "magic search" tools on any desktop environment I've used. Windows 7 is close, but doesn't include any fancy results (can't have it do quick math, etc). Mac's Spotlight gets everything right, except it won't open a new window if I type, say, "firefox". It'll just pull up a window I already have open (no way to change that behavior without weird hacks). Unity's gets confused and breaks too often. Cinnamon's sorts results alphabetically. Gnome's is fairly close to ideal, though it forgets launch history too quickly (if I type "calc" and select LibreOffice's Calc just _once_ it'll start showing that first, instead of Calculator which I want 95% of the time when typing "calc").
Type 'updat' and all search results disappear completely.
Type 'upd' and now it shows Windows Update but not the Java update.
Type fast and get different results than if you type slow.
Type the same thing a third time and get different results than the first two times.
And now Cortana keeps bugging me with lame notifications. How do I turn this off?
- The user types 'upd' and pauses. The most likely thing the user wants is Windows Update, so show that.
- The user continues typing (typed 'upda' so far). The user doesn't want Windows Update otherwise they would have picked it earlier. So show Java's updater.
- The user keeps typing (typed 'updat' so far). Well the user didn't select Windows Update or Java's updater, so who knows what they want. Don't show anything until we get more letters.
The logic works unless you're dealing with human beings who don't pause and pick the one correct action at every point.
I think that includes all human beings. None of us pay full attention at all times. Who did the PM think they were targeting?
That's exactly what I meant though I said it in an ironic way.
Speed of typing seems to matter for 'downloa' but not for 'download' or 'downloads', see my other post for the full non-story and two possible fixes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15766965
Type "pho", it suggests Photoshop
Type "phot", it suggests Photo Boot
Type "photo", it suggests Photoshop again
Photoshop most started application so it offers it at 'pho'
yet you keep typing another char, so apparently its not photoshop you search for, maybe its the number 2 app that is required, lets offer photo booth.
Ah wait the user keeps typing, well i only got two proper options, let suggest option number 1 again.
https://everything.en.softonic.com/
"Everything" is a fantastic lightning-fast system-wide search that's tiny and can run standalone.
I wonder why windows can't have something like Everything integrated in explorer? It surely can't be that hard to index file names when you're the OS yourself...
In the "Others" section
You have to wonder: how is it that a single developer can build something so much better than a behemoth like MS? They should be seriously embarrassed.
I think Windows started going downhill for two reasons: When Microsoft coopted the desktop version to add mobile-oriented features (Windows 8), and then when they coopted it to start cross-selling their cloud and Web services.
(Screenshots; SFW)
Anybody knows how to get that "calc" thing working as expected?
The user thinks 'type, "hello"' and the muscle memory flits between 'h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o' with way less space between each letter than the user's reaction time. If they mistype a letter and want to correct it, they'll probably continue for one or two strokes and either navigate back or tap backspace several times.
Personally, I think it's done on purpose, as every time it searches, it counts as a search in Bing, and that way they can use that to show how many people use Bing to charge more for advertisers.
Meanwhile, all this stuff just works on desktop Linux, because its goal is still to optimize user experience rather than some monetization metric at the expense of usability.
Windows used to be optimized around user experience.
I can't think of a time in recent memory I would describe windows as focused around user experience, it has always had dark corners.
Many of us far prefer Windows to MacOS.
And it's not just old habits:
I came to the various linux desktop environments after Windows and i still prefer some of them over both Windows and MacOS.
(Spent almost 3 years on Mac. Started as an enthusiastic user. Left really disillusioned. Have later come to the conclusion that it is really great and I'm just incompatible:-)
I don't get this one. Do you not like that it's different from Windows; do you not know that the feature exists; something else? <http://osxdaily.com/2013/09/16/select-multiple-files-mac-os-...
Unless, perhaps, Windows Explorer doesn't behave like a list-box and selects individual items with shift-click? Or, Windows lets you select a range in icon mode, while Macs don't?
You can press Command+C to copy files, then press Command+Option+V to move them.
But window management on Windows is a pain now with auto-snapping and the stupid charms thing or whatever it is popping up all the time.
This was not meant as a comment on the preference between MacOS and Windows, or the user experience.
What I am questioning was the assertion that UX was the major engineering driver for MS in building windows. i.e. "optimized for".
While I can buy the argument that apple's engineering was driven by UX (for good or for ill) it doesn't seem to me that this was true for Microsoft. Not that they never think of UX, but it is sometimes trumped by other concerns.
It is not as beginner-friendly as apples products, but far more user-friendly.
Last time I used Windows it was more inconsistent than ever, with two completely separate environments (metro and whatever they call the classic one), and three control panels (to which their answer is to shrug and say "just use the search box")
Microsoft does have good UX though - in the Office team. Just not in Windows.
Thankfully you pretty much never need to use it for anything past installation-day.
I have an iPhone now, but Siri is so hit-or-miss that I rarely use it for sending, and it doesn't read me received messages at all. With Windows phone when I got a text in the car I immediately heard "You got a text from __________, would you like me to read it, or ignore it?" That's what a digital assistant is made for, and it was amazing. If only Windows Phone hadn't stagnated and died, I'd happily still be on it.
The inability to find installed programs by name is laughably unacceptable. How they continue to push this stuff out is amazing, their management must be really awful.
You might also like http://www.getwox.com (basically Alfred for Windows) which can also search the Everything DB.
There’s also stuff like https://mobile.jam-software.de/ultrasearch/?language=EN and https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/
Yeah, Cortana is awful and if you totally remove it, you break the start menu (just like removing IE back in the day...sigh). Blackbird can stop the Cortana stuff from loading, though: http://www.getblackbird.net/documentation/
I highly recommend Blackbird for stopping Cortana and the other stuff it does (telemetry / tracking blocking + stopping W10 mandatory updates). I basically run this + https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 on new W10 installs at minimum. https://chocolatey.org is also a big improvement for Windows if you don’t already know about it.
I have no idea, but I hit the exact same behavior in Mac OS’s command-space menu and iOS’s “two finger drag down on the home screen” search bar. (Sample queries: “calc”, “calculator”)
For me, the real question is: How did this behavior get cloned by multiple vendors?
Implementing something this bad is non-trivial. How did it make it into multiple operating systems? How can more than one person on earth think it’s a good idea?
How did these 2+ people hire engineers competent enough to implement it? Who told accounting to approve this project?
What is it like to work in this office? Do they keep the toner in the coffee machine, and the cream in the xerox machine, but only on Tuesdays? Do they drive like they design products (are they the reason my 9 mile freeway commute is creeping up to over an hour)?
The more I think about it, the more questions I have.
After I upgraded to the paid app, the problem suddenly fixed itself. But I keep having shivers. It shouldn't be Spotlight's business.
"dmenu is a dynamic menu for X, which reads a list of newline-separated items from stdin. When the user selects an item and presses Return, their choice is printed to stdout and dmenu terminates. Entering text will narrow the items to those matching the tokens in the input.
dmenu_run is a script used by dwm(1) which lists programs in the user's $PATH and runs the result in their $SHELL."
In practice you press Super + D, type a few letters to match the name of your program (such as "fox" for "firefox"), and press enter. It's so fast that any delay is near imperceptible even on older hardware. It also accepts command line arguments if you don't care to read the stdout from the process. This is a stupidly simple program that works with no configuration unless you want to change the font size.
My only gripe about it was that it would’ve been useful to be able to write math expressions in it like you can in Spotlight... so I made a wrapper script which adds that :) https://github.com/mortie/mmenu
https://github.com/DaveDavenport/rofi
It has default submodules to replace dmenu_run, a similar mode that lists the XDG applications (akin to the Start Menu you get on Mint, Fedora or other full-fat DE), SSH that parses `~/.ssh/config`, a dmenu-compatible mode for scripts and a Python API to implement custom modes.
Linux is vastly superior in stability, package management and just basic productivity.
There are of course still trade-offs such as drivers which, although so much better than what they used to be decades ago, are still not quite on par with the ones released for Windows in most instances. That being said, if you plan ahead a bit with your hardware purchases you'll have a great experience under Linux.
Now I use dmenu in i3wm and I couldn't be happier. All I need is something that searches my path for applications... and that's what it does.
However, I do believe it's just an unfortunate bug, nothing more sinister there. Still would be nice to know: why?
When you registered the app I assume it modified itself, triggering a re-index.
There are the occasional bugs though, and there’s also aggressive caching.
But you're just dragging a special type of folder off a disk image, so nah.
This was a weird coincidence or bug, nothing more. I've used free and trial versions of IntelliJ on Macs countless times without search ever having issues with them. It's hard to imagine how you'd even make the system work in that way, as an app developer.
The other thing was, naturally, it has a database behind the scenes which historically was prone to silently breaking with no UI cue. Back when I did Mac system administration one of our scripts ran this periodically to deal with missing or duplicate entries in e.g. the Open with… menu:
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -seed -r -f -v -domain local -domain user -domain system
mdutil -E -a
Windows Search was great in Windows 7 - you could configure the fulltext search index through control panel and use it from the start menu. I used to index all my markdown notes and pdf documents with it. Then it started getting worse and worse with later versions of Windows. The start menu search looks comppetely detached from the index settings and, as you noticed, can’t even find installed applications. The only way to use the „old good” search is by using the search box in the explorer window when you are on the computer level. I’m still wondering what was the reason for those changes.
Install Classic Shell and disable Cortana. I do it on every Windows machine I set up.
Most people just want to change things to make a name for themselves. It doesn't matter if it's an improvement for the user.
https://www.howtogeek.com/273824/windows-10-without-the-cruf...
This is exactly why I use a ChromeBook.
No Cortana, just old school search like in win7.
>How did it even get launched in this state?
Microsoft wants to make money with services not software. I can understand their reasoning. Nobody wants to pay for an OS anymore. Win10 is their new business strategy: Cortana and the Store.
Microsoft does not want to sell something that strips out the stuff they make money from.
Another fix could be putting a shortcut to the exe (named what you want) into C:\Users\YOUR-USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs, for me these seem foolproof.
However I'm similarly flabbergasted with what's going on in the start menu search (which I assume is part of Cortana since this is where her blue ring appears after clicking the home shaped icon): I type in 'downloa' and I get option to search the web (in Bing in Edge of course, despite my default being Firefox + Google) and/or 'Download maps for offline use', 'Delete downloaded maps', 'Windows Defender settings', 'Windows Defender security center' (all are built in Windows things) and after few seconds (and my Windows is on an SSD) it seems to catch up and detect the Downloads folder (that comes standard with English Windows install and isn't in any deep or hidden spot...). I add one more letter and get 'download' and the same happens but Edge online search is available only for a split second.
And then the finale: having 'downloads' (or 'Downloads', not that Windows is sensitive even if NTFS deep down can supposedly be set to be) in there looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/Jlhno I have no idea WTF just happened to have the actual Downloads folder as third result after Microsoft Store (?!) and online search with Bing in Edge (sigh...) and hidden in a sub-menu after looking for literally 'downloads'.
Another funny thing is that for me searching for 'Notepad' matches Notepad++ first and Windows built-in Notepad second. I'm not exactly unhappy about this one but it's weird, it might be heuristics but then why doesn't it work heuristically for the 'downloads' search and gives me the store I never used instead of the folder I access daily?
So to find µTorrent, you don't type 'tor' like any sane person on earth will do, but have to "translate" that to µ to a u, and even then it will not show up. I have to type 'uto' to find it. Easy, right?
I cannot even begin to count how many times I've tried to search for an application by name that I know is installed, only for it not to be found, then have to manually navigate in Windows Explorer to Program Files (or Program Files x86, damn you Microsoft) and launch it by double-clicking on the executable itself, which was named exactly what I thought it was and yet Cortana couldn't find it.
I never want to perform a web search from the Windows start menu. If I want a web search I'll do it in Chrome's address bar. When I type "notepad" I want it to launch Notepad, not query the web!
Does anyone think that Cortana is an improvement? How did it even get launched in this state?