[ewoodrich]

Alfred is fantastic since it let me remove all the junk I don't care about in Spotlight. Which makes search ridiculously fast for the only things I ever want to use search for: opening applications and basic OS functions you mentioned like locking, entirely using the keyboard. There's a fantastic Alfred feature of an additional locking shortcut that blacks out the display immediately instead of meandering on the lock screen afterwards.

I have never had any desire on any OS to search the web, or the app store, or even my files for that matter (without doing so deliberately). Having everything mangled together is so distracting to me and only slows me down. Started liking my M1 Macbook Pro so much more after I discovered Alfred while searching for any tricks that would let me pare down Spotlight to essentially nothing.

I debloated my Windows 11 search to do close to the same thing (although not quite as good as Alfred) and remapped search hotkeys to be consistent across both platforms which is just so pleasant as someone who routinely needs to switch between MacOS and Windows.

[eviks]

on Windows you can also use a standalone launcher like Keyprinha to do the same - only choose the stuff you want to be indexed. And then use Everything to find any file anywhere instantly (can be setup to show results in the same launcher)