5 ms·

And spotlight. Why is desktop search so bad everywhere else?

by jjoonathan 7y ago

bobbiechen 7y ago
True. I recently picked up Albert [1] on my Ubuntu machine because I was missing spotlight search. So far it works well - it would have been nice if something like it was included by default. https://github.com/albertlauncher/albert https://github.com/albertlauncher/albert
robk 7y ago
Everything is soooo good on pc
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  I am forced to use Windows most of the time. The fact that its desktop search is soooo bad is a daily bummer and makes me look forward to opening my MBP.
  - snazz 7y ago
    It seems like part of Microsoft's goal here was to direct traffic to Edge and Bing at the expense of actual usability. See also: the "help system". Luckily there's a lot of third-party stuff to replace the search feature.
JadeNB 7y ago
I don't understand the people for whom Spotlight works. I tend to open Spotlight, and start typing in the name of a file I'm looking for. Consistently, reproducibly, for many different files, it'll fill in the name of the file at a certain point, but then, if I keep typing that very name, it'll switch to a different match. That is, if the name is `abcdefgh` and I type `abc`, then it'll complete it; but if momentum carries me and I type `abcd`, then it'll drop the desired file entirely off the list of suggestions, and give me a different, non-matching one.
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  Huh, interesting, because that exact problem is one of my key complaints with windows search, while I've never noticed it with spotlight -- and I've been using spotlight daily since Tiger. Well, that's not quite true, for a few years after spotlight was released it would get slow after a while, so I mainly stuck with Quicksilver. Eventually spotlight got faster, but I never had that particular problem with it, even though I very regularly have that particular problem on Windows.

5 ms·

And spotlight. Why is desktop search so bad everywhere else?

by jjoonathan 7y ago

And spotlight. Why is desktop search so bad everywhere else?

bobbiechen 7y ago
True. I recently picked up Albert [1] on my Ubuntu machine because I was missing spotlight search. So far it works well - it would have been nice if something like it was included by default. https://github.com/albertlauncher/albert https://github.com/albertlauncher/albert
robk 7y ago
Everything is soooo good on pc
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  I am forced to use Windows most of the time. The fact that its desktop search is soooo bad is a daily bummer and makes me look forward to opening my MBP.
  - snazz 7y ago
    It seems like part of Microsoft's goal here was to direct traffic to Edge and Bing at the expense of actual usability. See also: the "help system". Luckily there's a lot of third-party stuff to replace the search feature.
JadeNB 7y ago
I don't understand the people for whom Spotlight works. I tend to open Spotlight, and start typing in the name of a file I'm looking for. Consistently, reproducibly, for many different files, it'll fill in the name of the file at a certain point, but then, if I keep typing that very name, it'll switch to a different match. That is, if the name is `abcdefgh` and I type `abc`, then it'll complete it; but if momentum carries me and I type `abcd`, then it'll drop the desired file entirely off the list of suggestions, and give me a different, non-matching one.
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  Huh, interesting, because that exact problem is one of my key complaints with windows search, while I've never noticed it with spotlight -- and I've been using spotlight daily since Tiger. Well, that's not quite true, for a few years after spotlight was released it would get slow after a while, so I mainly stuck with Quicksilver. Eventually spotlight got faster, but I never had that particular problem with it, even though I very regularly have that particular problem on Windows.