[ch_123]

For me, search integrated into the start menu was a major quality of life improvement. Particularly the ability to hit the Windows key and type the name of an application. Strictly speaking, this was introduced in Vista, but I feel like Windows 7 added a lot of useful polish to the Windows Vista style of UI.

I otherwise agree that the older Win 2k era UI was pretty much an ideal UI. The whole "frutiger aero" look did not age well.

[Timwi]

The Start Menu integrated search would have been real nice if it worked properly, but unfortunately they decided on some kind of “search” algorithm that can't even do a substring match on items in the Start Menu. I have no clue what the thinking there was, but it drives me to not want to use it.

[rincebrain]

I think what drives me mad is its nondeterminism.

If I hit Winkey and type a string, it should not be the case that I get different results from doing that 6 times in a row because it depends whether some background task which changes the results finishes first.

[embedding-shape]

Another thing these "search boxes" (happens on macOS/iOS also AFAIK) is that sometimes even exact matches don't match unless you're using some specific length.

So if I type "ABC" I see the right application. If I type "AB" I don't see it anymore. But if I do "A" then I see the right application. So you have to then always remember to do either "A" or "ABC", because doing "AB" shows a completely different result as the first hit.

Completely bonkers behavior, and shit like this convinced me that neither Microsoft nor Apple has actual UX professionals employed anymore, or they don't have sufficient power to actually influence how things are made.

[edvinbesic]

A personal pet peeve of mine as well, and a good example of when a product is trying to be too clever. I think (suspect) what is happening is that it is remembering partial matches and your selection, but like you I find it has the opposite effect.

If I type `f`, the first item on the list is Firefox, if I then type `fi`, it selects Figma instead. Keep typing, `fig`, now it has a Safari tab selected instead for figma.com. Pinnacle UX.

[bflesch]

Yes, there have been some obvious race conditions - especially with the web results or on gnome/linux with the listing of open browser tabs.

In a similar vein the browser search bar keeps remembering things you mistype once, and if your automatism is to type "n" and then press enter to go to "news.ycombinator.com" you will end up on the wrong page over and over again, because internally it keeps a counter and ranks higher depending on number of times you have "clicked" it.

Quite annoying UX with many search bar implementations and it makes me feel like the people who design these are not actual power users of their own software.

[jve]

Yeah... sometimes it doesn't find anything.

Anyways, this has pitched me towards app "Everything"

I occasionally check whether after all these years MS has fixed the search... no, no surprise there.

I get that it depends on indexing service which may be buggy, etc... but I guess it is possible to prioritize/have alternate index for most important stuff like executables. This bugs me the most: there is a program, but I cannot find it. I must know to navigate my way within start menu or program files (for stuff like debugging/perf tools from Microsoft)

And given lots of comments there are on HN about Windows search, why no MS guy here silently sitting has escalated this "sentiment" to the correct ears? Oh please.

[ConceptJunkie]

Given that Windows search has been this broken for decades, do you think Microsoft is going to start caring _now_?!

Next thing you'll be asking to make OneDrive even remotely predictable in its behavior (other than the predictability of "never doing what I expect or want").

[Gathering6678]

Everything is an absolute gem. I literally cannot survive on the work computer without it. At home on Linux, this is one of things (probably the only one even) I really missed from Windows.

[pndy]

Have you seen FSearch? https://github.com/cboxdoerfer/fsearch It's quite similar to Everything.

Btw, there's also fooyin which you may say is "modeled" after foobar2000 https://github.com/fooyin/fooyin - another piece I miss from Windows.

[Gathering6678]

Ah yes, FSearch is what I'm using right now. Although, correct me if I'm wrong, it relied on a search database and is slower? I remember reading somewhere that Everything is so quick because of NTFS - not sure about the technical details, though.

[toast0]

That's annoying, but I think what's worse is these:

Start typing a word, see the thing you want, finish the word, it disappears.

And

Start typing, see what you want, stop typing and hit enter, but it changed to something else between when you saw it and when you hit enter.

[rincebrain]

Yes, I've had a number of these.

One of the most annoying ones combined these two properties, so depending on various internal races, typing a four letter word would either open one program, the folder that program was installed in (!?), or attempt to Bing the common word

[wildzzz]

It was a little clunky in Windows 7. Typing in "device" brings up "Devices and Printers" before what you likely want, "Device Manager". It also sometimes just forgets about things that definitely exist. Like on my Windows 7 machine, I have two command prompt shortcuts to python venvs pinned to the start menu. One is called AppName Python and the other is AppName Python Dev. Both shortcuts exist in the same folder yet when I use the search function in the start menu, only the Dev shortcut shows up. Before I made the Dev venv, the main shortcut would always show up but now it doesn't.

I've got another PC with the same setup running Windows 10 but they both show up in search results just fine.

[ConceptJunkie]

Yeah, I never used it. I have barely ever used it since then.

[nikanj]

Now you can hit the Windows key, type Visual Studio and open a Bing search for Visual Studio, instead of actually opening VS. It’s great - if your KPI is bing DAU

[venzaspa]

I know it should be the default, but if you turn off online searches for the Start Menu, it operates exactly how you'd expect it to on Windows 11.

Windows 11 is also a lot faster than 7 was on equivalent systems. Windows 7 would take minutes to boot.

[hulitu]

Win11 is dog slow. Even on ssds. Maybe it is linked to the insane number of svchost.exe instances and telemetry processes. Try running Win 11 on a SMR spinning disk.

[RiverCrochet]

Windows 7 had a good chance of being installed on spinning disks. I think even the cheapo Win11 systems at Walmart have SSDs now.

[Gud]

Windows 7 never took minutes to boot on a reasonable computer.

[TheScaryOne]

>Windows 7 would take minutes to boot.

Citation needed. I went from Win7 on a i5-2500k that booted in sub 15 seconds on a SATA SSD to Win10 on a 5600x that takes 45 seconds to a minute to boot an NVME drive.

[1718627440]

Windows 7 on my 15 year old GNU/Linux computer in a VM boots faster than both Windows 10 and Windows XP also in a VM.

[dmos62]

I use the Win-key+[start typing] search all the time, but I also used it in the XP era. Only then it was a third-party app, with order of magnitude more customization and control. I actually have a worse experience now, but it's just above my tolerance threshold so I don't do anything about it.

[Uncle_Brumpus]

I've navigated systems this way for so long, I forget people do it any other way. Someone from IT had to remote-connect to my system yesterday to do something, and to get to the control panel they opened the start menu --> clicked the Settings gear --> Bluetooth & devices --> Scrolled all the way to the bottom of that page to click "More devices and printer settings", which then opens 'Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Devices and Printers', then clicked "control panel" in the address bar. I was baffled. Winkey --> type "CON" --> hit Enter is so many fewer steps.

[lichenwarp]

O R D E R O F M A G N I T U D E

THEY SAID THE THING!

[bflesch]

Wouldn't it be below your tolerance threshold then? ;)

I feel during XP times it was basic string matching, and sometimes I miss that. At one point on linux they also started matching on description text, but then application maintainers started to add keywords to their description text for their app to rank higher, which again made it worse to find whatever you are looking for.

[TheScaryOne]

>search integrated into the start menu was a major quality of life improvement.

Too bad it's been completely broken by Windows 10. It can't even find the names of software I have pinned to the start menu. One of the things I miss most from 7.