alt Hacker NewsA small but big detail that irritates me is one used to be able to search Applications faster through the dedicated Applications overlay, but now this behavior appears to just be a shortcut to Spotlight, which suffers from incredibly poor index planning.
In the past, when Spotlight was too slow to show me my most used applications by the first few letters, I'd bail and use Applications.
Now I'd have to use Finder, but opening that up would be slow enough that I'd almost need a desktop shortcut.
So, in essence, I have to hack around the most common functionality of using an application on an operating system, which is finding the damn thing. And this is supposed to be the most polished operating system on the market?
Apple frequently appears to be asleep at the wheel.
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Yeah, I used to have a hot corner set up so that I could fling my mouse towards the upper left and then type the first letter or two of the app name, just like in Gnome.
Now that causes the screen to freeze for half a second (possibly my fault - I have 'reduce animations' switched on, but it seems to freeze the screen for the duration of the animation that would previously have played), and then the colour wheel spins for a couple of seconds, and then it might finally respond to my keyboard input... but even then, it fails to find the app maybe 20% of the time. This is on a ~1yo M4 Macbook Pro w/ 36 GB RAM.
So for the past month I've been training myself to alt+tab round to the finder window and navigate to the apps folder from there.
I've never been much of a Macos fan, but this is shockingly poor - less of a papercut, more a wedge of smouldering bamboo shoved under my fingernails.
On the other side of the fence, I enjoy the new Spotlight-for-Applications that opens when I hit the touch bar key (I still have an M1) for the old Launchpad. It seems to sort programs by frequency, so it knows that I open Ghostty far more often than Ghostery, and typing "Gh" will bring me to Ghostty instead of Ghostery. In the old Launchpad, applications were always presented alphabetically when you began typing, so Ghostery always was selected instead of Ghostty. I had to type "gh" right key enter before, but now just I just hit "gh" enter.
Tahoe's new Spotlight refresh includes an application specific option (open spotlight then arrow/cursor to the right or press cmd+1), and it will only match on applications, which is indeed very fast compared to a full blown Spotlight search...
except it doesn't match on Apple's built-in applications like Calendar or Screenshot.app, which makes it useless to me since I don't mentally separate Apple Apps from third party ones when trying to find or search for apps.