Spotlight has always been my go-to example of search done right. Hilarious that they’ve windowsified it.

I’m still surprised that people at Apple think translucent windows are somehow great for the user. Just look at that screenshot. What is the advantage of making text more difficult to read by default?

It was great up to and including Sequoia. Tahoe and Golden Gate have this weird input delay and their results are all over the place. I haven't looked this up, but it strikes me as no coincidence that this happened at the same time as they shoehorned AI bullshit into Siri.

I've been bitten too many times by doing cmd+space to open spotlight, then typing term and enter to launch a terminal only for the fucking thing to decide what I really wanted was to launch Windows 11 or Linux in a Parallels VM and use that terminal instead.

What the actual fuck, Apple?

I've never had these issues, did they change something? I do notice that it tends to prefer its own services over other things.

Meanwhile, to open vivaldi on kde, I just hit alt+space, type "viv" and hit enter. One of these is developed by a trillion dollar company.

open Spotlight by pressing Command + Space then press Command + 1 to show just your apps

Raycast is much better

Correction: Use Tinycast instead. It’s an open source port of Raycast

Siri/Spotlight (now that they're combined) are horribly broken in MacOS 27. I need to reboot my laptop daily or it just spins and can't pull up any results, it just spins. It used to work flawlessly.

it used to be perfect on old versions, seems like they made it worse..

Things I've done on my work Mac trying to open vscode:

• Pull up google search results for Victoria's Secret in IT managed Chrome
• Pull up the install web page for vscode in Safari (not my default browser) when the app was in the bloody applications folder already. This was after I disabled all the optional spotlight bullshit. Apparently "Siri Suggestions" were both manditory and ignored your default browser.

I feel all proprietary stuff started getting actively worse in the teens. Luckily open source was hitting its stride at that point.

Doesn't matter the OS. I'm searching manually.

Use Quicksilver. https://qsapp.com/

Spotlight has always been fucking useless for finding anything on Mac. Quicksilver has so many other features in addition just finding an file or folder, youcan manipulate the file, rename it, send it somewhere, copy it, etc. all kinds of plug-in for extensibility.

And it learns what you type and what you actually open, so it ranks and learns your searches.

You can also modify what the interface looks like and skin it and change the colors.

It's so bad. I was trying to bring up the system prefs for the keyboard, and it wasn't even visible because there were all kinds of other things, including the more deeply nested accessibility -> keyboard settings.

Nah, you can easily configure spotlight to show only what you want in the results. There's a lot of things to criticise about Mac OS but that's not one. Spotlight is one of the best indexing/search engine.