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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

Every single interaction I've ever had with Cortana has been complete garbage. It's worse than the old-school "simple string match on installed applications and files on disk" in every way, yet has somehow supplanted it?! I wish there were some easy way to completely uninstall this frustrating garbage in Windows 10 and go back to the simple interface that just worked.

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?

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See, I thought Cortana was Microsoft's name for their voice assistant on Windows 10 or something. Now everything is starting to make sense. I kept having issues using the Windows menu search in Windows 10. I'd type "remov" and it would show the menu item for uninstalling applications. Great. But if I accidentally finished and typed "remove" the result would disappear. I felt like I was going crazy or something. Comforting to know everyone is having similar problems ... though still just as bewildering as to why it's happening in the first place.

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").

That same thing (Calc/Calculator) happens to me every day. haha. I never thought about how that is probably affecting a ton of users.

oh my, I'm not alone! ;)

Anybody knows how to get that "calc" thing working as expected?

Have the same problem all the time, one time it was too much and I just uninstalled Libreoffice (of course in the end I just had to reinstall it)

surely that's a reason to turn off the stupid microsoft search, not to get rid of libreoffice

We're talking about searching in the Activities view of GNOME 3. I don't think it can be turned off (usually it's great if there isn't a name collision)

Have you considered installing KCalc? It should come first. :)

There IS a magic search tool, I've been using it for years.

https://everything.en.softonic.com/

"Everything" is a fantastic lightning-fast system-wide search that's tiny and can run standalone.

Despite your glowing review, I cannot bring myself to download and install anything from sites like these. I'm sure it's a great program.

Everything's site is voidtools.com

https://www.voidtools.com/downloads/

Indeed, umatrix just blocks the whole page from loading by default. So something seems off :-)

You can get it via ninite.com

In the "Others" section

My bad, I think I grabbed the wrong URL and can't edit the post any more. vinw's comment referencing Void Tools is the correct url.

I have been using Everything for a long time and would gladly recommend it to anyone trying to search their files on windows. It even supports regex searches. It is one of the very few softwares I miss when using linux. The search part of everything is lighting fast.

Everything is such a hidden gem. Simple and lightning fast, I can't imagine using a computer without it now. Compared to it, Windows's search is worse than garbage. There have been more than one occasions where Windows can't even find a file in a folder even when I have typed in the exact file name.

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...

There's a feedback item for it. Upvote!

For Linux users I can recommmend FSearch, which is inspired by Everything Search. http://www.fsearch.org/

Logged in just to upvote you .. Everything is the fastest search tool I have ever used. It is ridiculously good. From memory, it doesn't index files, just reads the File Allocation Table.

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.

We aren't the customers. The advertisers who pay to show up as Search Results are the customers. That's why.

We are the customers though, that's why it's so tragic a fall. I spent something like $200 for Windows. Microsoft doesn't get to use that excuse here. It's not some free service like Gmail; Windows is paid. See also the OneDrive advertisement fiasco.

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.

Thanks very much for the info. I've been headscratching about how to read ZFS quickly, now I have some ammunition to convince the ZFS devs with!

I remember one time Everything was mentioned someone also mentioned Wox but a reply said the combo launcher+Everything is not as good as separate tools.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13738309

Everything pairs well with AstroGrep!

I was reading the discussion on my mobile, but opened up the page on my desktop (where I am logged in), just to say that this is an amazing little tool! Search is blazing fast. I have been a happy user for the past 5 years.

This program comes with, well, you might describe it as a bit of an easter egg:

https://imgur.com/a/TZVw8

(Screenshots; SFW)

Everything is truly a gem that makes Windows usable. I use it more than Explorer.

I can highly recommend Alfred (https://www.alfredapp.com/) for Mac. Best system-wide search that I've used and you can even create workflows!

Shout out for Wox. https://github.com/Wox-launcher/Wox its what I went to when Launchy stagnated. Its one of the first things I install on new PC's

Check out keypirinha http://keypirinha.com/ if you like Wox. I prefer it over wox a lot.

Defender flags the installer as virus :/

That calc example is the exact reason I uninstalled libre office. Google sheets is good enough for everything I need

giant screw up with typeahead

Avafind is da thing if you are on Windows.

Doesn't affect me because I've been using Qalculate as a calculator for years. "qalc" is qalculate, "calc" is LibreOffice. Problem solved :)

There used to be a program called X10. It would index into Lotus Notes, word docs, PDFs; everything on my computer. It worked great for about a year, then was bought out and went to shit. All this AI search stuff is garbage.

In addition to the tools others mentioned, check out Agent Ransack. It's like visual grep and it's fantastic for finding text in document (including binary docs). It runs on demand only so it won't sap any of the system resources.

Type 'upda' to get Windows Update, but instead it shows Java's updater.

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?

I just played this game a few minutes ago with Device Manager. I have developed a habit that when I search the Start menu, I slowly type one letter at a time and wait for the result each time.

Just right click the windows menu next time, everything you could want is in there.

I think that explains what the programmers who wrote Cortana were thinking. The reasoning must have been as follows:

- 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.

> 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?

> I think that includes all human beings. None of us pay full attention at all times.

That's exactly what I meant though I said it in an ironic way.

That doesn't explain this: https://imgur.com/a/Jlhno

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

Same with Spotlight search on macOS:

Type "pho", it suggests Photoshop

Type "phot", it suggests Photo Boot

Type "photo", it suggests Photoshop again

I get different results on this too but to the same effect. At least macOS still gives you all options underneath whereas Windows 10 will just not show you anything sometimes

I don't think its that weird?

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.

One app search engine I deal with: type “remo” and hesitate a heartbeat. System fills “remove”, meanwhile I finish “ve<enter>” and the system searches for “removeve”.

man locate

Have you tried KRunner?

I've been trying out Listery (http://www.listary.com/) which is the best thing to Alfred on Windows I can find. Like an updated Launchy.

My favorite thing is when I search for a program, it comes up, I go to click on it or press enter, and then the web search finally comes back with the results and now I'm opening some browser with a random fucking web search. ARGH.

That kind of shit is frustratingly common these days. I sometimes use the search box in the Twitter app to navigate to one of the profiles I follow. So I tap on the magnifying glass, enter the first few letters of the account name, see the account in the search results (immediately, because it has my list of followed accounts cached locally, I guess), and I tap on that account ^W^W the completely irrelevant search result that appeared a fraction of a second before my finger touched the glass.

I've never understood this. You shouldn't be able to activate a control that appeared, or whose meaning changed, an amount of time ago that's smaller than human reaction time (0.2 sec or whatever).

Okay, now try typing on a smartphone keyboard that animates an enlarged bubble for every key the user taps.

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.

I had "except in cases where the user can plausibly predict the change" originally in my comment before deleting it for being verbose. Yes, of course this UI guideline is not a hardware rule. (Also, in the case of typing it's actually not an issue. The visual of the button is revealed but yo could never click the bubbles so the functionality of the button didn't change. A better example is a moving target in a video game.)

Always goes to Edge for me too despite the fact that I've set chrome as my default. Why do I need a web search in my windows bar anyway? Does anyone use this workflow?

I have similar issues with Edge on Windows. When it auto completes a webpage, it will do a bing search instead and have that as it's top result.

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.

I believe you might be right about the why. Windows used to be optimized around user experience. The deal was, I pay my $200, and I get a good operating system. Now, I still pay my $200, but what I'm getting is an operating system optimized to generate further revenue from me, at the expense of basic usability. This might be acceptable in a F2P model, but not when I've paid good money for it!

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.

Are you sure that wasn't MacOS ?

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.

Believe it or not:

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:-)

Yeah, if you have never used another OS, MacOS seems like the best. But when even the simplest pro things don't work, it gets beyond annoying. Some examples - Cut, Paste files; Shift select files; Minimise and how it works with Cmd+Tab; Maximise the way it works now. I need something like BetterTouchTool to even tolerate MacOS. It's the terminal (Ubuntu on Windows is great but still needs more work) and the quality hardware that's keeping me on Mac.

Hell yeah. I had to work with a Macbook for 3 years now, and I long for next week when my new non-Macbook finally arrives in the office.

Some of that behaviour is a bit awkward, but then there are amazing magical jewels like Automator and active folders.

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.

Charms? Like the sidebar? That dies with Windows 8. There's a selection of other windows that appears if you snap something, but if you ignore it it goes away.

It can also be disabled in the taskbar settings.

> Shift select files

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-...

Yeah, it's been a while since I've used windows seriously (e.g. the last version I used consistently was 2000), but afaict, selection in Finder's detail view works basically the way it works in list-boxes on all platforms: shift-click selects a range from the last selected item, command-click (ctrl-click on non-Mac) selects individual items.

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?

Not shift click but rather shift + arrow keys. Shift + click requires moving to the mouse. The other option is using the list view - which I don't prefer. (May be I've something messed up? I can't seem to shift + arrow to select more than a few files.

It sounds like something is messed up on your computer. shift + arrow keys works perfectly for me in all three Finder views.

Some examples - Cut, Paste files

You can press Command+C to copy files, then press Command+Option+V to move them.

See my added comment - this had nothing to do with user preference or any judgement on which system was "better".

When you've run an obstacle course to fluency, often a Stockholm syndrome sets in, and you think this is the best obstacle course. It changes you; how you reason, predict and judge. It become natural and intuitive. Your neural net overfits. Other obstacle courses seem arbitrary and unreasoned. They inspire disbelief and derision.

Up through 7, ignoring the occasional sucky release like ME or Vista that you could simply skip, Windows was quite good. I liked it more than MacOS. Something changed after 7 though, and it's no longer trying to be a good desktop OS that puts the user's needs first.

What changed is that they're trying to become more like Apple or Google in that users buy a series of "Windows devices" and have them tied to their Microsoft Account so that it's linked into all the cloud services like Windows Store, OneDrive, Office 365, etc.. While they haven't actually removed support for local accounts, they've added progressively more dark patterns to encourage people to log in to Windows with a Microsoft Account instead. Last time I looked, there was an outright warning against using local accounts if you create one during the install process (specifically, that if you forget your password Microsoft can't reset it for you).

It's hard to undersell how massive a usability improvement the Start menu was compared to System 7 installed-application-launching, where you had to either manually mess with aliases or just root around the Finder each time.

Well System 7.5 came out around the same time and bundled the hierarchical Apple Menu (which IIRC was some shareware they acquired), into which everyone stuck an alias of their Applications folder, resulting in a pretty similar (if somewhat less fully featured) UI.

Update as I can't edit original.

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.

Actually MS has had really consistent and great UX. To the point where any slightly computer-literate person would get an intuition about where something ought to be located and be almost always correct.

It is not as beginner-friendly as apples products, but far more user-friendly.

My main work machine is windows - I wouldn’t go that far though I think I know where you are coming from. From where I sit some of their engineering decisions seem much more driven by platform goals, etc, rather than user experience.

Which version of Windows are you using at work? It has definitely gone downhill since Windows 7, hence this entire conversation. I'm curious if you could expand on the platform goals and how that has affected things.

Could see the argument that Windows is as user-friendly (I would disagree, but I could see it), and as consistent (all OSes have their weird UI hangups) but not "far more".

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.

Yes, metro is an unexplainable mess.

Thankfully you pretty much never need to use it for anything past installation-day.

Windows has been the dominant desktop operating system for going on three decades now. You don't get to that position by being hard to use for the average user. I'm curious what other concerns you think may have trumped usability over the majority of Microsoft's reign? I'll give you one to start off with that the DOJ fortunately shut down -- Consolidation (e.g. bundling IE into Windows Explorer).

I can't speak for Cortana on desktop Windows 10 as I don't use it there, but when I had a Windows phone it was by far the best of the big three for hands-free communication while driving. It understood every command, every word, and was able to flawlessly send texts by voice and read responses back.

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.

I just keep a window open running "everything search". Insanely fast and actually works!. Cortana is worse than useless for my use cases.

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.

What is "everything search"? Is that third party or does it ship with Windows? That sounds like something I need.

https://www.voidtools.com/

https://www.voidtools.com

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.

Thanks so much. I will definitely try these out. It's a shame to have to resort to third party tools to have an acceptable experience for such a basic OS use case as finding and launching applications. I don't know what the hell they're doing over there at MSFT anymore, but they're missing several basic building blocks of a good OS.

For what it's worth I'm another person who's been using "Everything" for years and love it.

Alfred is Spotlight. Conclusion: switch to a Mac if you want a working computer.

or, y'know, the other operating system not trying to turn a profit on you, Linux.

Reddit.com/r/TronScript also works well for killing off Cortana and the telemetry "features"

Everything search is amazing especially for music and pdf searching. Highly recommended and seems to be updated more frequently these days.

> How did it even get launched in this state?

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.

Just to be fair: I installed a copy of IntelliJ IDEA on my macOS. It was the trial version. I use Spotlight (and a year back, Alfred) to launch my all applications. However, Spotlight couldn't find the app for it's life, even if it found all the other apps in the same directory.

After I upgraded to the paid app, the problem suddenly fixed itself. But I keep having shivers. It shouldn't be Spotlight's business.

Did it happen right after install? It usually takes spotlight a few minutes to index any new program - trial or not.

It persisted for the whole month of the trial period. I rebooted multiple times during that period and also checked the Spotlight settings for a few times that they wouldn't exclude anything - and nope.

This sounds like a series of coincidences more than anything. Spotlight has to index your drive at intervals so, if you recently added an app, it's possible that the app hadn't been indexed yet by Spotlight. Then, by the time you had done the upgrade to paid, Spotlight had indexed the file and and then it started working. There's nothing nefarious going on there. It just sounds like a coincidence.

I can speak to this too. Latest version of MacOS. I installed Spotify weeks ago, and Spotlight just never indexed it (it's in the /Applications folder). I use Spotlight to launch every app... except Spotify, which it can't find.

What fixes it for me is reindexing via going into Spotlight preferences and adding /Applications to the list of folders not to index, then removing it.

I don't know what the priors are, but Spotlight having missed the app for a 30 full days, and then suddenly finding it after the full registration, sounds very unlikely to me.

However, I do believe it's just an unfortunate bug, nothing more sinister there. Still would be nice to know: why?

A bug kept it from indexing the app when you first installed it. Forcing a re-index of /Applications would have fixed it, likewise duplicating the app and deleting the original.

When you registered the app I assume it modified itself, triggering a re-index.

You'd think that installing a new app would add it to the index right away.

If more non-store Mac apps had an "Install" process, you would.

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.

And it does. Copying any app bundle to an indexed disk, like your boot drive, will cause it to get indexed immediately.

There are the occasional bugs though, and there’s also aggressive caching.

Spotlight indexes continually, it doesn't run at intervals. (it uses fsevents to subscribe to changes to the disk and processes those as they come in)

I've experienced similar. My most pleasant experience with finding and launching applications is, surprisingly, in Linux. I think it's best in breed now. If you'd told me this 15 years ago I wouldn't have believed you, but it's gotten much better over the years and everything else has somehow gotten worse. I spend more time using Linux as a desktop OS than anything else these days, and it "just works".

What DE do you use? Back when I used Unity in Ubuntu I found their search widget really hard to use. It was laggy and mixed in results from the web, their 'appstore', and my files.

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.

Not at my computer, so can't provide a detailed answer yet. It's GNOME something-or-other though. Not Unity. And the menu is question that just works is accessible from something like Alt-F2 or the super key (it's muscle memory and I'd need to be at a keyboard to say for sure).

The Unity search menu was really frustrating. It had confusing category buttons, and if you did a search that only had results in a specific category, it would inexplicably turn on that category filter and use it for future searches too until you cleared the textbox. I loved pretty much everything about Unity except for that baffling bit. I'm almost glad they're killing Unity just so it means people aren't subjected to that wacky design decision or bug.

KRunner on Kubuntu os a joy to use.

Krunner is the reason why I'm looking forward to the KDE Plasma phone.

I think dmenu is a good example of this. It's a common launcher application that's (at least) known to all i3 users. Here's a succinct explanation from the man page:

"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.

dmenu is so refreshingly simple. There's no attempt at being clever, no attempt at using “AI” to figure out what you mean; it just does a stupid deterministic search and lists the results alphabetically. There’s exactly zero chance for it to suddenly incorrectly second guess your command.

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

If you want the same experience with more eye-candy, look into rofi.

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.

I have the same experience.

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.

I've had the same problem with Spark and even Xcode, so very unlikely it's Apple willfully refusing to index. What fixes it for me is reindexing via going into Spotlight preferences and adding /Applications to the list of folders not to index, then removing it.

Did you ever open the folder which contains the app? Spotlight at least used to use the Launch Services database which was … idiosyncratic … about updating things. The Finder displaying it would reliably trigger that.

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

The other thing you can try is nuking the Spotlight database:

    mdutil -E -a

That'll be slow for a little while as it reindexes whatever it's configured to index but it fixed a fair number of odd problems, which often turned out to be due to previously-unknown hardware issues.

Use `mdfind foo` in the terminal on mac. I hate Spotlight and use Alfred instead.

Spotlight can't find the IntelliJ app on my macOS either, but mine is registered.

Spotlight works by indexing applications and files every once in a while (for speed), so sometimes it doesn't find newly installed apps.

I believe it indexes continuously by watching the filesystem: https://imgur.com/sipDUCD.

Another vote for Alfred, here. I use it for launching absolutely everything, so when I install something new I notice how long it takes to be available. Couple of seconds max, every time.

Sorry it won’t be about Cortana but Windows Search in general.

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.

> I wish there were some easy way to completely uninstall this frustrating garbage in Windows 10 and go back to the simple interface that just worked.

Install Classic Shell and disable Cortana. I do it on every Windows machine I set up.

reddit.com/r/tronscript will remove all the OEM and Metro bloat, kill off Cortana, and disable the telemetry "features"

I use a nice little utility called Launchy[0]. It is invoked by Alt-Space (or whatever shortcut you like), is lightning fast and finds the right application 99% of the time. Based on your problems, I think it could be worth checking out.

[0] https://www.launchy.net

https://github.com/Wox-launcher/Wox is very similar but has a more active community.

Interesting! I've been using Launchy for years, mostly out of old habit. I'll certainly try Wox!

> How did it even get launched in this state?

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.

Using any of the start menu replacements (StartIsBack, Start10, Classic Shell) will give you the old interface and somehow gives you the old search engine too. Has the nice side effects of making Cortana completely disappear and giving you right click uninstall options for all the apps.

Searching with start menu on Windows 7 was lightning quick. On Windows 10 it takes forever to find the simplest thing, and like you said, it's worse than normal string match search, half the time it won't even find what you're looking for because the word you searched for is the second word in the name.

Check out Windows 10 LTSB

https://www.howtogeek.com/273824/windows-10-without-the-cruf...

Microsoft gets to harvest your data more easily, has a "feature" that can "rival" Siri, and artificially increases Bing's marketshare in terms of total number of searches. Win-win-win for MS. That said, I have no idea how they managed to mess up file/program search so badly. I have had the same experience as you searching for files/programs I know for a fact are installed and it refuses to find them.

Microsoft gets to harvest your data more easily, has a "feature" that can "rival" Siri

This is exactly why I use a ChromeBook.

Enterprise LTSB is what you're looking for.

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.

Unfortunately, Windows 10 LTSB is only available as part of Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 10 Enterprise is only available with a volume licensing agreement.

Yeah I didn't get it legally.

Microsoft does not want to sell something that strips out the stuff they make money from.

Perhaps http://voidtools.com/support/everything/ would interest you, I now use it all the time and my mind is blown by the fact that NTFS and (ReFS) has these features but Microsoft doesn't expose a nice GUI for them... I seriously consider looking into replacing my start menu with something that'd be much more fit for me personally, scriptable in Lua and query from everything daemon instead but I have no idea how feasible or easy that'd be but classic shell is a thing so it's clearly technically possible (I think, unless it's a dirty hack).

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?

Gettting rid of annoying and privacy violating Win10-Stuff: https://www.winprivacy.de/english-home/

https://reddit.com/r/TronScript will kill off Cortana and all the telemetry "features"

If tere just was an alternative OS. Maybe even one that you can dl for a free. Crazy. I know. Itll never happen!

It wouldn't be so bad if you could just turn it off but that seems impossible with the latest release.

That is because Widows Start search does not do a String.IndexOf(search.ToLowerCase) > -1 but a String.StartsWith(search, EVERYCULTURECRAPTHINGIEVERDIDINDOTNET).

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?

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