> 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.