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Comment by nolongerthere | Hacker News Reader

A lot of that functionality was neutered in Win10 and even more was totally removed in Win11, imo the issue is that apparently all the UX devs at microsoft use macs and are trying to MacOS-ize windows.

Specifically the start menu is no longer nearly as keyboard friendly as it used to be, but other parts are also broken, settings is supremely broken wrt keyboard nav, the context menu is just a mess in Win11.

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Start menu is also stupidly laggy. You hit start and have to wait before typing text will actually activate the search.

Much better to install PowerToys and hit Alt+Enter to find whatever exe you need. And if you're hunting down a specific file - install Everything, then Alt+Enter -> Everything -> search to your heart's content.

Speaking of PowerToys, does anybody know of similar generic useful tools for Windows? I know that a lot of such apps exist for macOS, but I haven't found many for Windows.

There's Monitorian to change external screen brightness, eartrumpet to give a better audio settings experience in your tray and AutomaticDarkMode to change your system theme based on some conditions (such as time). These are the utilities I always install. Apart from that I use ExplorerPatcher because win11 took a big step back in the start menu and task bar flyouts.

Thanks!

Add in flowlauncher and it becomes even more useful.

Looks slick! https://github.com/Flow-Launcher/Flow.Launcher

Do you know if it does anything like what Everything does re/ tapping into Windows's underlying file database?

Looks like there’s an Everything plugin https://github.com/Flow-Launcher/Flow.Launcher#everything-pl...

The best is https://fluentsearch.net/ that supports on screen keywords search as well as a powerful launcher and file indexer. For screen search it supports UIA as well as image/text based on OCR like search. It is the best and more accurate than win-vind.

PowerToys Run is even slower than the Windows start menu. And I have disabled a half of the plugins including file and folder search.

Confirming the other comment - I've always found it to be much faster than the start menu, on every corporate issued ThinkPad I've used in the last year (3). Maybe something is weird on your machine.

Might want to reinstall. Mine was also sluggish on the first installation but afterwards run swimmingly

I find it to be much, much faster. Not sure what might be the difference between our experiences here. I basically dont open the windows menu bar anymore, especially since the powertoys run bar has a shutdown keyword too.

> And if you're hunting down a specific file - install Everything, then Alt+Enter -> Everything -> search to your heart's content.

Imagine your operating system's search is so bad that you allow a closed source app to hook the entire file api

I absolutely detest how I have had to train myself to pause after hitting the Windows key.

I believe that's at least partially because they rewrote it in UWP.

It’s the focus on Bing integration and waiting for web results.

Doesn't Classic Shell (or whatever its follow-up is called) fix this like it did in Win10?

If not that alone is reason enough for me not to upgrado to Win11.

start menu searching was amazing in windows 7 and completely bonkers bad in windows 10 (haven't tried 11).

It's actually hard for me to fathom how they took the best OS they've ever produced (win7) and evolved that into win10.

> and completely bonkers bad in windows 10 (haven't tried 11)

Still bad in 11. The other day it had a hard time finding notepad for some reason, even after typing in the full name.

The worst is that lots of the time you can just type “not” and hit enter and 99% you’ll get notepad. But then it’ll randomly just do something else.

God forbid you don’t disable bing search. If you don’t, that search is all kinds of fucked up.

yes! I've seen that too, especially after a fresh reboot. But if you wait a bit and search again it'll find it.

I… what? OSX has been very keyboard friendly for as long as I can remember. Sonoma is buggier than previous versions, but you're been able use the keyboard to navigate most UI widgets except for the menus just as before.

What does that have to do with it? They're clearly going for the aesthetic without considerations for how users actually interact with it. It's likely they don't even know how what keyboard navigation is like on MacOS, because they don't use keyboard navigation.

It has no access keys (underlined letters in menus) which forces you to use touchpad

You can definitely navigate the menu bar with your keyboard, there's even a little search thing in there to search through the menu items.

> except for the menus just as before.

that's a huge exception

it's not discoverable in the slightest, but if you hit fn-control-f2, you can access the menus via cursor keys instead of having to use the mouse

Thanks for the tip, I'm aware of it, but it breaks the core benefit of Alt+X : guaranteed repeats, with fn-control-f2-F-Enter you can't be certain to open the File menu since there might be another menu starting with F

Predictability is a core feature of UI design

Anyway, personally I use a better alternative to fully recreate the Alt+X to open a menu via keyboard maestro, so I've sovled the issue for myself, but it still is a core Mac deficiency contrary to the "OSX has been very keyboard friendly" claim

It's actually listed here:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236

And so is "open the help menu" which would take you right to the menu search widget, but that doesn't seem to work at all in Firefox or Electron apps.

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