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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

Type-to-search is significant— Ubuntu has it, MacOS sort of has it (Spotlight), Windows 10 definitely has it. It wasn't until it mysteriously broke last week [1] that I suddenly realised how dependent upon it I had become; I felt like a caveman manually paging through the list of installed software or seeking out the proper icon on my desktop.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2020/02/09/windows-...

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You lost me at MacOS "sort of has it". MacOS's spotlight works the best out of all of them you listed. AFAIK, in Gnome, you can't search for text in files with the search function. I believe you could in Unity. Window's search mostly works, but I've had issues with it looking for text in files.

Yeah windows default search is kinda bad. Its only really OK for applications and settings. For everything else file related voidtools Everything is a godsent.

I'm back on Windows 10 now after a decade of MacOS.

But my recollection is that it's fine as a search feature, and not that great as a launcher— if you just blindly type a prefix and press enter (as you can on Windows or Ubuntu), you end up launching a window of extended search results. Maybe I was doing it wrong somehow, but whenever I used Spotlight to search for an app, I needed to type it in, wait for the search to completely resolve, and then use the mouse to select and launch the application out of the results.

As far as the filesystem goes, navigating in Windows with the keyboard is WAY easier.

I can't seem to figure out how to effectively navigate the file system on MacOS without resorting to the terminal. I routinely have trouble locating mounted file systems, can't figure out how to type in a specific path I want to go to, etc. These things are trivial on Windows, but seem not to be possible on MacOS. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and assume that I'm just too used to Windows to discover this functionality, but it's a real PITA.

Try Cmd+Shift+G in finder or open dialogues.

Very helpful. Thanks :)

Wish this was a bit more discoverable on MacOS - I think that's what windows' file explorer is particularly good at. Though, I'm almost certainly biased.

Why does MacOS only "sort of" have type-to-search?

AFAIK, it only searches through your apps, not files.

I just tried searching for a file with Spotlight and it found the file by name.

Spotlight is the OG OS integrated full text search, originating 2004/5:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(software)

Spotlight has not been useful to me in over half a decade. It never finds the files I need, despite the fact that I know they're there, I know I typed them right, and I know its settings hasn't hidden or ignored them. And instead it almost always shows useless files in completely obscure parts of the OS that shouldn't even show up in Spotlight. I turned it off like a year ago and haven't regretted it since.

Interesting- I find it very useful. It even searches my email that is locally cached. Lots of apps create hooks into it. Major part of the ecosystem that makes MacOS what it is.

Not sure why it's borked for you...

Maybe your md index is borked. Look into the mdutil (maintenance) and mdfind (search) commands.

Spotlight on macOS most definitely searches files, much of the system is in fact built on file system metadata attributes. (It was original designed by Dominic Giampaolo, who also architected BeOS's file system.)

> It was original designed by Dominic Giampaolo

This is the first that I'm hearing of this. That is absolutely sick.

Recently I discovered that Xcode uses Spotlight in an interesting way — when you want to convert crash logs from your apps into readable stack traces, you only need to place the relevant symbol files anywhere on the disk where Spotlight can find them. No need to import them directly into the IDE.

Not just FS metadata, it can index ID3 tags, EXIF, and whatnot, and it’s fairly extensible, although underused.

Kind of like the underpinning concept of AppleScript and app dictionaries, awesome tech and concepts, but it’s sad to see the promise of the extensible, composable desktop slowly dying.

It seems like an inaccurate statement, I would argue OSX was the first one to do type-to-search properly... Not a huge Ubuntu user admittedly.

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