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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

> One underappreciated thing about Windows 8 is that even if the start menu was ugly and blocked the entire screen, you could press the windows key, immediately start typing, and then press enter to somewhat deterministically pick the top app. This made it feel quite fast.

Decent operating systems support this, and have for decades. macOS has the spotlight search (cmd-space), and most Linux DEs have some form of it too (eg XFCE's appfinder).

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OSX's command-space spotlight search has been degrading functionally (at least on my machines) for literally years now. It peaked around ~2012, when it would reliably search the full text of all documents on my local hard drive quickly, and not do anything dumb like "search the internet by sending whatever I typed up into the search field to the cloud."

Nowadays it fails to reliably search the full text of documents on my local hard drive, tries to search the internet despite my best efforts to prevent this, and often even fails to find a file ~/Documents/foo.txt when I explicitly search for the string foo.txt. This is uniformly true on several work Macbooks and a couple personal macbooks too.

A truly astounding regression in functionality!

I truly hate it! Why not use Raycast or Alfred?

Most Linux DE's it's even the same use of the Super/Win hotkey by itself. I do wish Linux distros would add an emoji picker with the Suler+. hotkey (matching Windows')... When it's there, I always forget the hotkey, same on mac for that matter.

KDE has Super+.

Bind it yourself?

Also I'm pretty sure default Gnome and KDE include emojis in their "start" menu search, which is its own kind of annoying.

A Shell (the UNIX one not the Windows term), is basically nothing other than this, with more features added.

microsoft powertoys has this feature

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