Comment by patapong
4 days ago
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.
Now on more recent windows editions, I find that I often need to wait for the menu to visually appear before it will accept any keyboard input, and the ranking shifts over time and includes web stuff, making this workflow basically useless.
I also really miss the aero look of windows 7... Eye-candy, sure, but I thought it was pretty, clean and modern looking. I am sad they moved away from it.
> 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).
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.
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.
KDE has Super+.
A Shell (the UNIX one not the Windows term), is basically nothing other than this, with more features added.
microsoft powertoys has this feature
> One underappreciated thing about Windows 8 is ... you could press the windows key, immediately start typing, and then press enter to somewhat deterministically pick the top app
I agree this is underappreciated but I believe it started in Vista and has worked pretty much the same way ever since, including in Windows 11. I acknowledge that start menu search in general is more bloated now and thus feels less snappy on slower machines. Still, for me, the specific use case you described has worked great for nearly 20 years even on modest PCs. I wonder why my experience doesn't match yours.
> I also really miss the aero look of windows 7... Eye-candy, sure, but I thought it was pretty, clean and modern looking. I am sad they moved away from it.
Me too! Aero was great. I also miss being able to make the taskbar truly black. It looked really nice coupled with a black wallpaper on an OLED display. Now you have to choose from a preset color palette. The reduced customizability of Windows 11 is frustrating.
On fast machines the latency is low enough I don’t complain… but the point about search results shifting is very much a problem. Often times searching a builtin windows feature will fail to show the correct result without some weird switching around of the wording. E.g try searching for “turn windows features on or off”.
That was exactly the same behaviour in Windows 7 though; it wasn't exactly novel. At least Windows 7 searched your apps, and documents all at once. Windows 8 limited you to just apps. Windows 8 was a huge step down in usability.
Yes the start menu is now very slow with the web stuff enabled.
If you disable it, it becomes snappy again. Pretty crazy to me that Microsoft allows the default option to be that slow
I don't even bother using the start menu to sleep my PC anymore. I used to hit Win, then navigate with arrow keys to sleep, but at one point an update broke it so you couldn't navigate to the power menu with arrow keys. I don't know if it's fixed now, but regardless it's way faster to hit
Win+x -> u -> s
Bonus is this goes back to like Windows 95 (albeit there was no Sleep option back then).
When I'm forced to use Windows, I now use Powertoys Run. So I press Alt-Space, then type the name of the app.
It works SO much better than the abomination that the Start Menu has become...
You can even type "%appname" to focus an already running app.