I always got the impression the reason MacOS has all these different third-party launchers and window managers is because the in-built functionality for keyboard-based navigation is so bad.

[1] https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/Krunner

[2] https://store.kde.org/browse?cat=628

On Mac, they’re ’app switchers’. They’ll launch an app, or switch to its running instance if there is one.

I dare say that this reflects the way that the Mac and Windows handle apps and processes. Either way, it makes this sort of thing singularly useless on Windows.

It might be useful to launch Outlook once, in the morning. But after that, launching more instances of Outlook is absurd. I want to switch to Outlook.

I don’t think Windows users really understand how useful these tools are as switchers; just how much faster it is to Cmd-Space, s[afari], return, and have your browser pop to the front. I should time it. If that took me more than about 100ms I’d be stunned, because I’ve done it dozens of times a day for well over a decade.

Edit: timed it. 375ms from the first sound of me pressing the space bar until Safari is on-screen. 200ms of my action, and another 175ms waiting for Safari to appear.

I like having the option to start a new instance (as apps also have the option of handling that, e.g. my text editor opens a new text tab if I launch it while it’s already open) or switching to an open app.

For example, Time Machine, which didn’t really do anything other OSes didn’t, but Apple integrated it into their universal preview system and gave it a nice fun and easy to use interface along with making it easy to setup on install.

In Windows you had to dig into a tab on the rt-click properties menu and the best you could do was find previous versions by date, and I’m still not clear on how you enabled/disabled Previous versions on install.

Of course, Time Machinenis also a great example of how Apple often overemphasizes aesthetics at the cost of actual function, where Time Machine is notorious about being extremely flaky about actually restoring from backup (to be fair, I was among the “lucky” people who’ve only had positive experiences with Time Machine, including a full restore).

I use that "text-based finder" approach _everywhere_:

    - Telescope in NeoVim (https://github.com/nvim-telescope/telescope.nvim)  
    - The "Actions" (Cmd-Shift-A) and "Find Anything" (Shift-Shift) shortcuts in IntelliJ
    - Alfred on my work macbook
    - KRunner on my personal linux laptop (with KDE)
    - The `t` shortcut on github to jump to files
    - the `!` "bang" shortcuts on DuckDuckGo

I haven't found a good equivalent on Windows, not because they don't exist, but because they're all focused on trying to do everything _but_ launch fast and swap to the application I want...so they wind up taking 4-5 seconds between "hit keyboard shortcut that invokes it" and "start typing", because they're busy indexing the registry or my recycle bin or whatever.

Windows+1..6 is a terrible keyboard shortcut as they’re both on the fingers of the left hand.

You’re limited to 9 apps, and good luck to your muscle memory if you ever change one of them.

You’re limited to apps. Alfred will open files, URLs, individual setting pages, it’ll send an email, launch a Terminal at your current file system folder … the list goes on.

I assume that many Windows people have never seen a Mac user using Alfred (or Launchbar or Raycast or whatever). You should. :-)

Windows and Linux users have had to put up with decades of tedious lectures and cheerleading from Apple fans who think their tool is faster/better/sexier than everyone else's, never mind the fact that their UNIX-based OS still doesn't ship in a usable configuration for keyboard-centric users.

Like most developers, I have been forced to use a Mac at work in several jobs, and each time I've faffed about with dozens of "productivity" tools that claim to solve the user interface limitations of the base OS - all of which felt about as rewarding as spending months tweaking custom vim configs - instead of just getting on with the actual job I was paid to do.

If you primarily use a keyboard, but you also need a GUI, Windows just works out of the box. It's not cool, it's not stylish, but it does the job. I have nothing against Mac users who enjoy customizing their systems, but please understand that many Windows power users have been there, done that, and decided that what we get out of the box is good enough for the vast majority of work we need to do on a daily basis.

For me it's not really worth my time to customize a system just to save a few hundred milliseconds in the unusual situation where I am running a completely different suite of applications every day, and I always have more than ten of them open, and I can't use my left hand for some reason, and I want to deep link a scripted shortcut into an app instead of just switching to that app and using a standard shortcut, or whatever. In my job, at least, I spend far longer reading code and thinking about the problem than trying to open a terminal, switch apps or send an email.

I do miss the Windows ~NT/2000 every-word-has-an-underlined-letter-that-you-can-use-with-the-alt-key era. Last time I used Windows (10) that felt like it was going away? Vestiges exist but they’re no longer so obvious?

Because that was/is a tremendously simple and effective way to get around, no doubt.

There aren't as many third party launchers for Windows because it already does 99% of what you want it to do, and the remaining 1% are features, not competitors.

Depends where. Where I live, most IT and development jobs are on windows and globally speaking the picture seems to be the same. Mac dominating SW development work seems mostly a SV/US thing.

That aside, Macs are definitely overrepresented outside of SV/US as well, being from EU myself, I don't think I remember a single office I've visited over the last 10 years in a number of countries that didn't look like an Apple store. Granted India/China alone are populous enough to dictate global statistics.

I guess it depends what type of companies you visit. I'm also from near Germany and zero companies i visited in the last 10 years looked like an Apple store. It was all Windows. If you only go to fancy Berlin/Münch startups I can imagine it's all Apple but that's more of a bubble even nation wide. Statistically Windows still has a majority in most companies.

With the right scripts, it could do anything -- and it was lightning quick!