Searching for “safari” does not show the Safari application in any of the visible results. I’m about 95% sure that, in previous versions, if any applications were an exact match for your search term, those would show up first.
Spotlight has always been my go-to example of search done right. Hilarious that they’ve windowsified it.
And that’s after 2500 hours of “indexing” (on iOS anyway)
that strange to hear because i feel like spotlight has been awful for at least 5 years. the new combining with Siri has made it suck a little less for finding what i need but i’ve had to resort to the search field in a finder window for quite a while to find stuff.
I’m still surprised that people at Apple think translucent windows are somehow great for the user. Just look at that screenshot. What is the advantage of making text more difficult to read by default?
It’s ‘form over function’ – who cares if it’s actually less effective and less efficient, as long as it looks pretty … but Apple does that a lot, in software and hardware. (And, tbh, it seems to be working out pretty well for them so far. The consoomers have spoken, and they agree form is more important than function.)
There are arguments about “surfacing relevant information” and “ensuring easier focus” in UI circles.
It’s why they went to all-flat surfaces. Ffs, what a load of horseshit - I have excellent vision and sometimes struggle to identify the topmost window, and I’ve been working with this stuff since before PC’s existed.
Can’t imagine how older people or anyone with any acuity issues deals with this nonsense.
Ehh, Windows Aero with the glass was still my favorite Windows theme. Yes, I’m a monster.
I’ve been bitten too many times by doing cmd+space to open spotlight, then typing term and enter to launch a terminal only for the fucking thing to decide what I really wanted was to launch Windows 11 or Linux in a Parallels VM and use that terminal instead.
What the actual fuck, Apple?
ok now that’s hilarious 😂
Meanwhile, to open vivaldi on kde, I just hit alt+space, type “viv” and hit enter. One of these is developed by a trillion dollar company.
kde is the best
Yep, same here. I have Linux (Debian + KDE) on my personal laptop and it’s honestly easier to use than my Mac laptop that I get from work. KDE’s file manager is better than Mac’s, too, in my opinion.
I never actually use alt + space in KDE, I’ll have to try that sometime. I always just press the super key to bring up the start menu.
I am a nearly life long windows user who converted to Linux a couple years ago and I just got a MacBook for work and I despise MacOS.
I have really been trying to be open minded and not be a hater about it, but the entire OS (outside of the terminal) is awful to me. I despise how Apple forces you to use their products the way they want you to and not hire you want to.
I never actually use alt + space in KDE, I’ll have to try that sometime. I always just press the super key to bring up the start menu.
Using the super key is actually slightly faster/easier anyway.
super --> v --> i --> v --> Enter
alt + space --> v --> i --> v --> Enter
Lets you use one keystroke instead of needing a key combination to start the process. Pushing one button is faster and easier than pushing two at the same time.
Six whole keystrokes? Who has time for that?
Obviously, you need to set a custom keyboard shortcut. Since my laptop has an extra weird keyboard button that used to be for ‘search’, I’ve set a shortcut of ‘search + V’ opens vivaldi. … And a bunch more shortcuts based on that as well, of course. ‘Search + T’ opens the timer app I use all the time. ‘Search + Q’ closes the current window, since this laptop doesn’t have an F4 key. ‘Search + W’ opens LibreOffice Writer. Etc, etc, etc.
When I was on windows, I used Autohotkey to create and override a lot of shortcuts so I could for example, just do
Win+vand it would open Vivaldi, if there wasn’t avivaldi.exeprocess running. If there was a process running, it would bring any window with “- Vivaldi” title to the foreground and holding theWinand pressingvagain would loop through open Vivaldi windows. It was a good workflow for me.Haven’t really tried to replicate it on KDE and does anyone know if that’s even possible?
The start menu style search system for KDE works. Alt space is an OSX style trainwreck that tries to do too much. At least I can turn most of the alt space smarts off unlike OSX and Windows
open Spotlight by pressing
Command + Spacethen pressCommand + 1to show just your appsThat is good to know, thanks.
the old way was better though
btw: if you turn on clipboard history, it’s
Command + Spacethen pressCommand + 4to access it
It was great up to and including Sequoia. Tahoe and Golden Gate have this weird input delay and their results are all over the place. I haven’t looked this up, but it strikes me as no coincidence that this happened at the same time as they shoehorned AI bullshit into Siri.
I’ve never had these issues, did they change something? I do notice that it tends to prefer its own services over other things.
Siri/Spotlight (now that they’re combined) are horribly broken in MacOS 27. I need to reboot my laptop daily or it just spins and can’t pull up any results, it just spins. It used to work flawlessly.
Don’t get me started on Siri AI. She’s worse than she’s ever been.
it used to be perfect on old versions, seems like they made it worse…
Raycast is much betterCorrection: Use Tinycast instead. It’s an open source port of Raycast
Things I’ve done on my work Mac trying to open vscode:
- Pull up google search results for Victoria’s Secret in IT managed Chrome
- Pull up the install web page for vscode in Safari (not my default browser) when the app was in the bloody applications folder already. This was after I disabled all the optional spotlight bullshit. Apparently “Siri Suggestions” were both manditory and ignored your default browser.
I feel all proprietary stuff started getting actively worse in the teens. Luckily open source was hitting its stride at that point.
Doesn’t matter the OS. I’m searching manually.
Generally I haven’t had any issues opening apps by hitting super, typing two letters, and hitting enter in linux desktops. XFCE whisker menu, cinnamon, and kde all just seem to work. The only major exception is that my brain wants the calculator app to be called calculator and it’s not so half the time I get spreadsheets instead.
my brain wants the calculator app to be called calculator and it’s not so half the time I get spreadsheets instead.
I got a giggle there
Use Quicksilver. https://qsapp.com/
Spotlight has always been fucking useless for finding anything on Mac. Quicksilver has so many other features in addition just finding an file or folder, youcan manipulate the file, rename it, send it somewhere, copy it, etc. all kinds of plug-in for extensibility.
And it learns what you type and what you actually open, so it ranks and learns your searches.
You can also modify what the interface looks like and skin it and change the colors.
Same. Been using it on every machine for many years. Man, gotta be well over a decade at this point.
Has never let me down.
It’s so bad. I was trying to bring up the system prefs for the keyboard, and it wasn’t even visible because there were all kinds of other things, including the more deeply nested accessibility -> keyboard settings.
Yeah! I’ve run into that, too. “keyboard” does not show the keyboard settings, and “security” does not show the security settings. And I know that they did in an earlier version; I used those all the time.
edit: OK, now it actually does, but it still sucks.
- It’s not the first item in the list.
- At first it shows a bunch of files that have “security” in their path name, then the Privacy & Security setting pops in about a second later.
- It shows up… twice? They are the third and fourth options and they are the same thing. Those both go to the same place.
