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I'm not sure there's a point to building launchers like this on Windows, since you can just open start menu and start typing straight away to find what you want. In addition to the standard search (admittedly not great in Windows 11 unless you kill Bing via regedit) there is Win-R to get the popup for running apps when you know the binary name, Win-I to open new Settings app with context-sensitive search, Win-X to get the admin menu with all the usual keyboard shortcuts, Win-T to quickly navigate the task bar, etc.

I always got the impression the reason MacOS has all these different third-party launchers and window managers is because the in-built functionality for keyboard-based navigation is so bad.

Start Menu and type away is a Windows... 10? 8? (Edit: Vista) addition. They had these launchers for Windows XP (OS X introduced them, and Windows devs copied the idea)

Start menu search will launch Edge+Bing rather than what you want if you make a typo. Also, not sure if fixed but in some older Win10 setup, search is non-deterministic (typing the same letter leads to different result. Though it's the same 95% of the time).

dmenu and rofi/tofi are pretty popular on Linux, especially with tiling window manager users. I use tofi with sway, and it's blazing fast compared to Spotlight (but Spotlight is searching a lot more things at once). They also take stdin, so you can hook them up to all sorts of things (eg. ssh hosts, clipboard history, password manager entries, etc.)

KRunner [1] on Plasma is pretty awesome. Plenty of plugins available [2] and it's also very useful out of the box on most distributions.

[1] https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/Krunner

[2] https://store.kde.org/browse?cat=628

On Windows, these tools are ‘app launchers’. They launch an instance of an app whether or not you have one already open.

On Mac, they’re ’app switchers’. They’ll launch an app, or switch to its running instance if there is one.

I dare say that this reflects the way that the Mac and Windows handle apps and processes. Either way, it makes this sort of thing singularly useless on Windows.

It might be useful to launch Outlook once, in the morning. But after that, launching more instances of Outlook is absurd. I want to switch to Outlook.

I don’t think Windows users really understand how useful these tools are as switchers; just how much faster it is to Cmd-Space, s[afari], return, and have your browser pop to the front. I should time it. If that took me more than about 100ms I’d be stunned, because I’ve done it dozens of times a day for well over a decade.

Edit: timed it. 375ms from the first sound of me pressing the space bar until Safari is on-screen. 200ms of my action, and another 175ms waiting for Safari to appear.

The feature in powertoys run is called Window Walker and has, in some way, been in every launcher I’ve ever used. I don’t think Mac users really understand that many of their fancy features are also a thing on other operating systems.

I like having the option to start a new instance (as apps also have the option of handling that, e.g. my text editor opens a new text tab if I launch it while it’s already open) or switching to an open app.

Apple does do a good job of packaging their stuff.

For example, Time Machine, which didn’t really do anything other OSes didn’t, but Apple integrated it into their universal preview system and gave it a nice fun and easy to use interface along with making it easy to setup on install.

In Windows you had to dig into a tab on the rt-click properties menu and the best you could do was find previous versions by date, and I’m still not clear on how you enabled/disabled Previous versions on install.

Of course, Time Machinenis also a great example of how Apple often overemphasizes aesthetics at the cost of actual function, where Time Machine is notorious about being extremely flaky about actually restoring from backup (to be fair, I was among the “lucky” people who’ve only had positive experiences with Time Machine, including a full restore).

In Windows every app gets a number corresponding to its position in the task bar, which you can pin if you like, and then you just hit Windows button and the number to instantly open or switch.

This is a common response whenever I talk about this, and I don’t find it compelling. (Sorry.)

Windows+1..6 is a terrible keyboard shortcut as they’re both on the fingers of the left hand.

You’re limited to 9 apps, and good luck to your muscle memory if you ever change one of them.

You’re limited to apps. Alfred will open files, URLs, individual setting pages, it’ll send an email, launch a Terminal at your current file system folder … the list goes on.

I assume that many Windows people have never seen a Mac user using Alfred (or Launchbar or Raycast or whatever). You should. :-)

Please don't be condescending.

Windows and Linux users have had to put up with decades of tedious lectures and cheerleading from Apple fans who think their tool is faster/better/sexier than everyone else's, never mind the fact that their UNIX-based OS still doesn't ship in a usable configuration for keyboard-centric users.

Like most developers, I have been forced to use a Mac at work in several jobs, and each time I've faffed about with dozens of "productivity" tools that claim to solve the user interface limitations of the base OS - all of which felt about as rewarding as spending months tweaking custom vim configs - instead of just getting on with the actual job I was paid to do.

If you primarily use a keyboard, but you also need a GUI, Windows just works out of the box. It's not cool, it's not stylish, but it does the job. I have nothing against Mac users who enjoy customizing their systems, but please understand that many Windows power users have been there, done that, and decided that what we get out of the box is good enough for the vast majority of work we need to do on a daily basis.

For me it's not really worth my time to customize a system just to save a few hundred milliseconds in the unusual situation where I am running a completely different suite of applications every day, and I always have more than ten of them open, and I can't use my left hand for some reason, and I want to deep link a scripted shortcut into an app instead of just switching to that app and using a standard shortcut, or whatever. In my job, at least, I spend far longer reading code and thinking about the problem than trying to open a terminal, switch apps or send an email.

I’m sorry, I was condescending. My bad.

I do miss the Windows ~NT/2000 every-word-has-an-underlined-letter-that-you-can-use-with-the-alt-key era. Last time I used Windows (10) that felt like it was going away? Vestiges exist but they’re no longer so obvious?

Because that was/is a tremendously simple and effective way to get around, no doubt.

This is indeed the main thing I use Spotlight/Alfred for on MacOS: I want to go to the window for this app, regardless of what virtual desktop it's on, and I don't want to hunt for it.

I use that "text-based finder" approach _everywhere_:

    - Telescope in NeoVim (https://github.com/nvim-telescope/telescope.nvim)  
    - The "Actions" (Cmd-Shift-A) and "Find Anything" (Shift-Shift) shortcuts in IntelliJ
    - Alfred on my work macbook
    - KRunner on my personal linux laptop (with KDE)
    - The `t` shortcut on github to jump to files
    - the `!` "bang" shortcuts on DuckDuckGo

I have the hardcore vim brainworms of "don't make me touch the mouse", and in _spades_ if that mouse is a laptop trackpad.

I haven't found a good equivalent on Windows, not because they don't exist, but because they're all focused on trying to do everything _but_ launch fast and swap to the application I want...so they wind up taking 4-5 seconds between "hit keyboard shortcut that invokes it" and "start typing", because they're busy indexing the registry or my recycle bin or whatever.

In the 00s there were a lot of them for Windows, since OSX introduced them and Windows devs tried to duplicate them. Some were really awful, needing a lot of time to render the prompt window (it was the age of the spinning disk, if that's an excuse). I've been running https://www.donationcoder.com/software/mouser/popular-apps/f... for maybe 20 years..

PopOS and SteamOS have this out of the box, hit the Windows key (or whatever the genericized icon is on your keyboard) to bring it up. On SteamOS it brings up the Start menu equivalent and on PopOS it brings up a lightweight UI like in the OP, but both are fuzzy-searching application launchers. I assume the same thing is standard on other Linux distros, those are just the ones I have on hand.

It's not that macOS is conducive to third party launchers, it's that you need these other launchers to replicate the the basic functionality that is built into the Windows launcher.

There aren't as many third party launchers for Windows because it already does 99% of what you want it to do, and the remaining 1% are features, not competitors.

Slickrun on windows was pretty handy back in the day. It was made by Eric Lawrence who also made fiddler. I believe he was an MS Employee on IE, then moved to google to work on chrome and came back to Microsoft to work on Edge. Clever chap.

Could it be due to the high percentage of Macs being used by devs compared to Windows and the fact that Mac software typically puts more focus on UI, even for developer-focused tools, compared to Linux?

>due to the high percentage of Macs being used by devs compared to Windows

Depends where. Where I live, most IT and development jobs are on windows and globally speaking the picture seems to be the same. Mac dominating SW development work seems mostly a SV/US thing.

I was implying more that among Mac users, the percentage of devs is significantly higher than among Windows users. I'd assume the same is true for higher cost PCs vs entry level as well.

That aside, Macs are definitely overrepresented outside of SV/US as well, being from EU myself, I don't think I remember a single office I've visited over the last 10 years in a number of countries that didn't look like an Apple store. Granted India/China alone are populous enough to dictate global statistics.

> I don't think I remember a single office I've visited over the last 10 years in a number of countries that didn't look like an Apple store

I guess it depends what type of companies you visit. I'm also from near Germany and zero companies i visited in the last 10 years looked like an Apple store. It was all Windows. If you only go to fancy Berlin/Münch startups I can imagine it's all Apple but that's more of a bubble even nation wide. Statistically Windows still has a majority in most companies.

Back when I used Windows (maybe 20 years ago) I almost exclusively interacted with it through the win+R run dialogue.

With the right scripts, it could do anything -- and it was lightning quick!