Hacker News Reader

Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

One of my favorite things about OSX are the standardized menus... which includes a search field in the "Help" menu. Searching for things there will show you where the menu is - it's a wonderful tool for both discovery and future optimization. And it's in every application.

I only wish it applied to more places. E.g. it searches help files, but they're basically always worthless, and it doesn't search non-menu things (settings, in-window toolbars, etc). Intellij has a nice cmd-shift-A which does most of this ("search everywhere" iirc), and I use it absolutely endlessly.

View on HN

This works in Windows too, but with one major flaw. If your Windows are localized (e.g. Czech), you will have to enter the correct name of the setting or service in Czech and entering its English name won't help you.

Which is a problem, because the vast majority of StackOverflow-like Q&As are in English and mention the necessary setting in English, of course.

And you cannot rely on your translational abilities, because many of the translations in Windows are stilted.

Nothing wrong with the Dutch one, when I use the English version of Windows. If I recall correctly.

A Dutch Windows 10 install won't find "control panel", but it will find "configuratiescherm". It won't find "credential manager", it will find "referentiebeheer". At least it was like this when I used windows ~2 years ago. Definitely a pain point.

That is strange. My Windows is in Spanish and 2 years ago it found everything in English with no issues and today it still does (Windows 10)

What? Windows has nothing in the slightest bit like macOS’s searchable menus. I suspect you may be describing the Settings app which lets you search by name, synonyms or description, and takes you to the appropriate place, but that’s a far cry from a searchable menus across all apps, where the searching also shows you the path to that menu item.

Wow, I didn't realize that macOS searched menus across all apps. TIL!

It's really nice: https://imgur.com/a/ZKSSiQc you can click the help entry and it'll act like the real menu too.

It's part of the standard, default menus on almost literally everything. There are ways to hide it if you're determined to be an asshole app (Cisco AnyConnect does this for instance, though there are so few menu items that it's not too horrible), but it's exceedingly rare because you have to explicitly remove it to have that happen. Far, far below 1%, it's mostly just awful corpware.

Reminds me of the search in iOS. I can find an app but it doesn’t tell me on what page or folder the f…ing app is.

Page, no, but spotlight definitely tells you the app's folder (if it's in one)

Cmd + Shift + P has the same purpose in Sublime Text. It's a really useful feature indeed.

Shift+Shift on Jetbrains IDEs. The best search feature by far. It fuzzy searches text, symbols, settings, actions, it also works with synonyms. No need to fiddle through settings.

M-x in emacs

Even better, if you use something like Raycast [1], you can search menu items via a global command palette without touching the mouse at all.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com