Ugh, Apple is guilty of this too in spotlight search. Actually worse, because it randomly changes after maybe 500ms, randomly, after typing a character, sometimes.

  N    -> OneNote.app
       -> Then (maybe) quickly changes to Notes
  No   -> Notes.app
       -> Then (maybe) changes to OneNote
  Not  -> OneNote.app
  Note -> Notes.app

etc

I'd say the way around it is to install Alfred [0] and be done with it. Just have to disable the web search option. Because no, I did not want to open a browser and search for "norepad", I just fat fingered it. Luckily once disabled it works just right.

[0] https://www.alfredapp.com/

That one is at least malleable. Suffer through invalid suggestions, wait, select the one you need, and after 10 or so attempts it finally learns that you always want that particular app as your first choice.

At least that's how it was before. I wouldn't be surprised if they broke it.

There's also Raycast [1], which is a f-r-e-e VC-funded alternative to Alfred that was mentioned by a sibling comment.

1: https://www.raycast.com/

At least you guys have software conflicts. I try to run "runemacs.exe" (I have no idea how you're supposed to run Emacs on Windows, but that's what I do), and it's:

R -> "R, the project for statistical computing" (fair I suppose)

Ru -> Run (what is "run"? It's that little dialog box from Windows 3.1 where you can type in an executable to run)

Run -> Run

Rune -> RuneScape (not something I have installed)

Runem -> Some Hearthstone game file

Runemac -> Search results for "run amok".

Runemacs -> Hey the thing!

> Ru -> Run (what is "run"? It's that little dialog box from Windows 3.1 where you can type in an executable to run)

This is the best. It opens immediately, no animations, ads, etc. I have a .bin folder in my home dir with full off shortcuts, this folder added to the $PATH so I just need to type my shortcuts to open any app.

Solid protip. Been doing the same since Windows 98.

Same here, and it baffles me how people don't immediately want this when they see it on my screen.

It sounds like you're trying to run an executable that's on your PATH. The start menu search does not apply fuzzy search to locations in the PATH environment variable (reasonably so, most of it is either going to be command line tools that need additional arguments and spawn a console window that instantly disappears or just junk that most users don't care about).

If you want fuzzy searching to work, add a shortcut in the start menu for runemacs by placing the shortcut in %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu

Apparently Powertoys Run does all of this correctly. It's also made by MS and its a QuickSilver/Alfred/KRunnrr/etc. style launcer.

This makes it even more inexcusable for the default Windows behaviour to be stupid.

It gets a lot better when you turn of web searches for the start menu search. Perhaps some people like having a single place to search for applications to run, documents on their PC, and things on the web. But I'm not one of them, and it slows down the search as well.

It's also slow[0], or not properly cached. Half the time I bang out 'c-m-d-<enter>' to open a command prompt and I either get nothing or a program that doesn't contain any of 'c' 'm' or 'd' in its name. Which is aggravating because the 'Win then type the first 3ish letters of the program you want then hit enter to open it' workflow is so good[0] but MS makes it hard to be smooth and repeatable with it.

[0]Honestly how? I have 32GB of ram, the name and directory of every program I've ever run probably fits in 100kB. You could even presort the list by the first two possible letters (26^2) at a tolerable memory usage.

[1]To my tastes anyway.

"everything" by voidtools could be to your liking.

I think that's down to the way it has remembered/saved your search as I get a similar behaviour with "Camera" and "Turn off camera access systemwide" -- "c", "ca", and "came" suggest the Camera app and "cam", "camer", and "camera" suggest the system setting.

I use both of these, and it looks like Windows has remembered I select one or the other at a given point, so is saving that suggestion.

It also likely has built in associations for the default applications (notepad, camera, etc.) that you've overridden by selecting notepad++ at those points. If you select/locate notepad++ at the other positions, I wonder if it will start suggesting that instead.

The notepad++ wiki has a trick for replacing notepad with np++. It basically installs np++ as a debugger for np.

I would be completely happy if my win10 stopped deciding I really want to search the word notepad on the internet with edge/bing

I had the same dance with Google search for a while with their top result for “tsplayground”.

Can you just replace notepad.exe with a link to notepad++?