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I find it interesting that, to my knowledge, launcher/assistant tools like this aren't common on platforms other than macOS. Windows has had one or two that I'

I find it interesting that, to my knowledge, launcher/assistant tools like this aren't common on platforms other than macOS. Windows has had one or two that I've seen, but not common, and I don't hear every Windows user swearing by them. Linux has GnomeDo, but I found it lacking, and again I haven't heard people swearing by them. ChromeOS has one I think, but I can't remember the name, and again it doesn't seem popular. macOS on the other hand has had Quicksilver, Launchbar, Alfred, and Raycast, to name just those that I've personally used, and Spotlight has been built in to macOS for a long time, with a launcher/utility interface for many years. I've also heard many people (at least in techie/knowledge worker circles) using them, and have met strong proponents of all of these options. Is this difference just down to my lack of knowledge of other platforms, or is there a grain of truth to this? If so, why? What makes macOS conducive to this (is it that these are all built on Spotlight and therefore can exist easily), and do users just demand this more on macOS?

Zanfa 2y ago
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?
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >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.
  - Zanfa 2y ago
    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.
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      > 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.
kqr 2y ago
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!
mafuyu 2y ago
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.)
alisonatwork 2y ago
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.
- netsharc 2y ago
  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)
- Krssst 2y ago
  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).
meekins 2y ago
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 https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/Krunner [2] https://store.kde.org/browse?cat=628 https://store.kde.org/browse?cat=628
netsharc 2y ago
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/farr https://www.donationcoder.com/software/mouser/popular-apps/f... for maybe 20 years..
jen729w 2y ago
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.
- Semaphor 2y ago
  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.
  - addicted 2y ago
    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).
LeonB 2y ago
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.
kibwen 2y ago
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.
gamblor956 2y ago
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.

Zanfa 2y ago

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?

Rinzler89 2y ago
>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.
- Zanfa 2y ago
  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.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    > 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.

kqr 2y ago

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!

mafuyu 2y ago

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.)

alisonatwork 2y ago

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.

netsharc 2y ago
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)
Krssst 2y ago
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).

meekins 2y ago

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

netsharc 2y ago

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/farr https://www.donationcoder.com/software/mouser/popular-apps/f... for maybe 20 years..

jen729w 2y ago

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.

Semaphor 2y ago
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.
- addicted 2y ago
  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).

LeonB 2y ago

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.

kibwen 2y ago

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.

gamblor956 2y ago

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.