Hm...the iPhone seems to think that pointing is where it's at. So does the TabletPC. We shall see I guess.

I love keyboard searching, but basically you say you are installing Vista, *an entire operating system*, just so you don't have to install Colibri, SlickRun, Launchy, or one of the many other similar and fully functional tools that give similar results for 10% cost and 1% hassle.

I wonder if Microsoft got the idea from Quicksilver on the Mac, which has been enjoying rave reviews for the past couple of years: http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/

Like every other "compelling" Vista feature, there is a free alternative.

http://colibri.leetspeak.org/

So, it's kinda like the Spotlight Menu in Mac OS X? To launch TextEdit (the closest equivalent to Notepad):

Command-spacebar t e x down-arrow return

(By default, Command-spacebar will open the spotlight menu and place the caret in the text box.)

:)

This is pretty much like OSX' Spotlight (or even Google Desktop's desktop search), and it does fall short of the wonderfully amazing Quicksilver on OSX which Simon Willison already pointed to.

Jeff, try QuickSilver, seriously (just get a VMWare OSX image)

Jeff - This (for me) is one of the (few) Vista features that is compelling for me (and BTW - Colibri is at best a crippled version of that functionality. It just doesn't work as well as I'd hope, for me).

One question, though - does Vista learn from your usage patterns and make it quicker and easier to use your regular programs? That, for me, is a killer feature of Quicksilver (the OS X program mentioned several times before in these comments). For example - my OS X RSS reader is NetNewsWire. I start this by entering 'NNW' in Quicksilver. The first time I did this, the first choice was some Cocoa documentation HTML page - so I had to select NetNewsWire from down in the list somewhere. Nect time, NNW went straight to NetNewsWire.

I also love the Start Menu search mojo, it's probably the most noticable feature I miss when switching back to XP for certain tasks.

Those mentioning QuickSilver, what does it do better/different? I'm really not going to waste a few hours just to find out so if someone doesn't mind sharing that would be great. Is QuickSilver an Apple product? It looks like it's just something that someone decided to write for a Mac instead of Windows.

Side question, why do people always want to talk about who had what feature first? Do you get points? Is this some fun meme game I don't know about? Does an angel get it's wings? Unless someone's a patent lawyer I don't get the point.

I'm a bit suspicius it looks a lot like the search feature in the "Window | Preferences" in Eclipse 3.1

I always agree that if something is a great feature and it can help in your application, you should copy the idea. But please, don't present it as something new developed by you, and even more important, don't ever patent it.

Seems you lost your lastname on the second screenshot... hidden vista feature?

I've been using Google Desktop for the same thing. For running applications as well as finding stuff in files. QuickSilver (OS X) is the best implementation of these types of features on any OS. As someone else pointed out, there are other options out there too. I also like to combine Google Desktop with WinKeys for keyboard nirvana.

Glad to see you've caught on to the times.... just kidding. Myself I'm a keyboard junkie so I'm always on the lookout for such applications. Imagine if Vista had been delayed or not included this feature, maybe you'd still be dealing with mouse clicking and the dreaded Start menu. :)

Lovely post.

Luckily there is a way for mere mortals like me, who do not have Vista installed yet, to enjoy the magic you're describing. There's an open source product called Launchy (http://www.launchy.net/) that can be installed on XP and lets you launch things by typing their name (comes with auto-complete of course). It's pretty slick looking too (although a bit buggy on my two-monitor setup).

Enjoy :)
urig

As mentioned before, there are several launching utilities available for Windows already. The one I use has better discoverability of programs than most I've found, but it doesn't support features like launching from your media library or url's.
However, I'm hoping they will provide an api to create new commands.
Unfortunately it's a bit pricey and not out officialy yet :S

I can only say three words. Oh. My. ..

IMHO, if Vista wants to impress me; it should be sold on it's merits based on how it leverages NEW idea's and technology(not a cheap hodge-podge of products someone else had to go invent FIRST at their own cost). Until it can honestly do that, our software suppliers can send all the "discount upgrade coupons" they want, at least I'll have lots of spare toilet paper

This is actually one of the features I don't like with Vista, sure I would have had no problems if it was there to be used but now they force us to use it everytime since the programs list has been reduced to a useless scrolling list of programs.

There is nothign wrong with point and click, this is a step backwards to force it upon people.

Unless I have not understood your post, I would say that the equivalent in Mac OS X would be the Spotlight search.

To launch Firefox, e.g.

Cmd-Spacebar, ff

As for the first comment re. iPhone, I think it is a natural way to use the finger to navigate on the touchscreen, at least for me.

What if you want to change the order in which things pop up? I know I'm going to want Notepad2 to come up before Notepad (though usually I replace the executable...).

Mr Coding Horror is slowly but surely becoming a member of the Great Unwashed Thurott tribe. Congrats.

Unsubscribed.

With google desktop installed, double-ctrl and then you have the pearls you described in this post.

typing trumps pointing, and Spotlight trumps Start menu.

Well actually I turned the new start menu off and went went back to classic mode because I prefer using the mouse, however I didn't know Vista could do the filtering so I might give it another go.

Regards
Lee

> it is an implied victory of textual search over traditional
> point-and-click desktop GUI metaphors

nice to read this sentence.

do you know why i so strongly prefer Firefox over IE ? because, when i need to search a webpage, i just have to type "/" followed by the text i want; the search toolbar opens immediately, the searched text hightlights while i type.

under IE6, i have to hit Ctrl+F, wait (usually 2 to 5 seconds) for the dialog box to open (why is it so long to open a "find" box ?), type my search then hit the "next" button. that's too long and by the time i complete the first step, i forget what i was searching for.

i do have a lot of similar examples, ranging from command-line completion to mobile phone menu shortcuts. this kind of features, when implemented right, are a real pleasure and a great improvement in productivity.

before reading people screaming about command-line completion: i am NOT a unix guru, command line completion works under windows (with a registry tweak under windows 2000, straight out of the box under XP) and the reason why i prefer multiple small command line tools over a single complex gui tool is that my typing skills are far better than my mouse-aiming skills.

I have started using Startease (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2064897,00.asp) from PCMag and I rarely use the start menu anymore. If you are a normal geek you have too many programs installed and you battle to find them.

The is also great for getting aroung lame programs such as "Cyberlink PowerDVD" where you need to look under C for PowerDVD! Type dvd and you are done.

I'm a bit surprised that someone so focused on usability and so aware of all the great applications out there hasn't been using some of these types of things on XP in the past (Launchy, Google Desktop, etc).

You come across just a _little_ bit too enthusiastic about a feature that so many others have been enjoying for so long.

How's that Acer Ferrari working out for you? ;-)

2 quick points:

It might work better if you could fill a shortcut with metadata and type that in for that application as well. I.E, type 'mp3' and get Winamp, etc. Also- if you typed 'mp3' and Winamp is not in the menu- search for it, and Windows would add 'mp3' to the Winamp shortcut

Also, -- Damnit!! I forgot the second one. It was good, too...

See, if you have a blog, once you discover something that's been around for years-- *that's news*.

I've never been in the habit of installing time-saving programs on my computer, or controlling everything from the keyboard, but I've always been surprised by the number of people who complain that Windows ends up with "too many programs" on the start menu. The simple solution is to create a directory called "utilities" (or whatever), and stuff all of the useless start menu shortcuts in there.

Sounds like Gnome Deskbar (very cool, still needs a bit of development) or Quicksilver. On that topic, what happens when you type an e-mail address or a calculation or a unit conversion into the start menu bar?

By the way, Launchy sucks compared to the others. The find-as-you-type is poor and it supports a very limited set of inputs.

I completely agree with you and hate the start menu. There are those alternatives (colibri, launchy) but they're not as slick as Vista. I did find a start menu alternative here (http://vseproject.extra.hu/) but again, due to the limitations of the Windows API, it's not 100% nor will ever be. Having said that, I'm still not moving to Vista as it just gives me nothing other than little perks (like this) vs the pain and suffering of say, oh, running IIS and SQL Server 2005 (which can be done, but I'm not about to create a haacked installation and jump through hoops of death to achieve it)

About the Find dialog in IE, I have noticed that the bigger the page is, the longer it takes to open - maybe it does some kind of indexing - or just stripping out the text from the HTML?

Launchy is a good deal better than Colibri, but neither of them is as nice as Spotlight, which doesn't really compare to Quicksilver. It's Quicksilver's ability to provide context-sensitive options based on the selected program that put it above the rest. Plus triggers. Plus the ability to append to a text file. Or run a command-line command.

Launchy is the fastest of the Windows bunch, but also has the fewest features. For launching apps it rules, but for navigating folders AppRocket beats SlickRun, Launchy and Colibri - once you've found a folder you can drill into it using the arrow keys. It's certainly the closest Windows app to the sublime Quicksilver.

Totally agree with the essence of the piece - all hail the keyboard!

I can promise you people in general will not like the removal of the normal folding out programs menu and this is a miss by Microsoft to remove it so completely.

People don't want to type and use arrow keys to launch programs. Some people here might think the folding menu was flawed but I wonder if that wasn't more a personal thing that they didn't keep it properly organized.

I simply do not understand how people can think that typing to access everyhting is a step forward in the year 2006, we left this back in 1993.

Like I said previously, I have no objections to the search functionality in itself, it's great as a complement to a normal point and click menu but should not replace it.

2007 :-)

Mod +1 Launchy.

Couldn't live without it.

I was a little disappointed... I found this link via reddit and I thought it was going to be a comparison/study of sorts on click based navigation vs. typing. Unfortunately what I found is a hooray for Microsoft innovating what's been around as added functionality in both windows and OS X for some time now. Also personally I like the command line, I never have to hunt and peck with the mouse and tab completion eases the number of characters I have to type.

Somehow I don't think this feature is reason enough to switch to a substandard OS.

PL - I've always kept my start menu immaculate but establishing myself with Launchy was such an illuminating experience. I don't care what my start menu looks like now, because I never use it. It's legacy technology as far as I'm concerned, the windowing UI has moved on.

This isn't like the command line on a Linux system, because search is integral: it is a very different thing.

The single-finger typing public may quite prefer the start menu, but for anyone with adequate typing skills it is a superior experience, even if they don't realise it yet. Someone should organise a contest - I'd be totally confident I could do a variety of routine file/application manipulation significantly quicker then a mouse-clicker.

Just one quick comment, the problem with mouse navigation for me is that I have to move my hand from the home row over to the mouse. With the example that Jeff gave (and others that the Spotlight users gave), it seemed like he had to type down arrow a number of times. That's about as bad as going over to the mouse, albeit slightly quicker.

Is there not a way to bring back my old favorite of tab completion for navigating paths? Or are we stuck with down arrow?

--clint

This is great news! I've noticed that my hand hurts more from using my mouse than from typing (and yes, i've tried all sorts of ergonomic mice). I'm looking forward to this feature.

Another (and IMHO better) alternative to Launchy, Spotlight etc. is Find and Run Robot:

http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/findrun/

It's fast, easy and very configurable.

View a flash demo here:
http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/findrun/Movie_FindRun/FindAndRun3_ViewletCam.html

Version 2 will be released soon and will include folder searching, even more great skins, and more.

Mac OS X has Spotlight for this, and has for some time. To open TextPad, I type

Command+Space (to summon Spotlight)
Note
Command+Enter (to open it)

It's taken microserf six years to come up with pithy little substandard (pre-existing) improvements like this, and to the supposed amazement of its loyal masses? Windows users are sheeple. Fortunately they have the MS brand to guide them through these treacherous times. -dry heave-

"those mentioning QuickSilver, what does it do better/different? I'm really not going to waste a few hours just to find out so if someone doesn't mind sharing that would be great. Is QuickSilver an Apple product?"

It's extensible via a plugin system first off. This allows interesting integration with other applications. For example, using the iTunes plugin you can start playing a song or add a song to the party shuffle from the command window. (http://docs.blacktree.com/quicksilver/plug-ins/itunes_plug-in )

You can start an email to someone. Choose to send it directly without opening Mail.app or not. (http://docs.blacktree.com/quicksilver/plug-ins/email_support)

There is a list of plugins and instructions on how to use them here (http://docs.blacktree.com/quicksilver/reference). Spotlight doesn't cover nearly as much functionality as Quicksilver does and, to the best of my knowledge, the new Vista start menu doesn't either AND it's not extensible. There are plugins for Subversion, FTP Programs, all of the iLife applications, iCal, iChat, other IM applications, you can run terminal commands from it, the list goes on and on. I have yet to find any application on the Windows platform, or any other application on the Mac, that comes close to Quicksilver. It's not hard to describe everything you can do with QS, it just takes a long time.

Wow, that's pretty extreme emotion. To summarise: you hate windows and MS?

“He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.” Abraham Lincoln

Whoops, forgot to add this.
"the iPhone seems to think that pointing is where it's at"

I think that the gestures in iPhone are the touch screen equivalent of keyboard navigation in Vista and Quicksilver. Rather than using nested menus or a stylus, you pinch or stretch a photo to resize it. Flip through your music collection instead of pressing "Next" or "down arrow" a hundred times. Want to listen to the 4th voicemail in your mailbox? Just poke it instead of listening to the first three.

Scott, I'm not generally convinced by Macs: iTunes, fanboys and no games. However, my next computer will probably be a Mac, simply because Quicksilver is so totally awesome.

As long as the up/down arrow keys still let you navigate around this should be ok. The concern is that of handling a tech support call where you need to instruct the user to click Start, and then navigate to a selection to hit enter; if they get stuck in a typing box it becomes far more difficult to get them where they need to be.

Convenient, yes. But with the recent Microsoft/NSA/Vista collaboration in the news, I really wonder if Vista should not be shunned altogether?

Meh. AppRocket and Google Desktop both do essentially the same thing. Yeah, Vista's start menu is a little "slicker", but it still isn't going to convince me to upgrade. Most of the apps I use more than once a week are in the quick launch or pinned to the start menu anyway.

To all the RDFies babbling about Spotlight - do you think any of us care?

Wow. The first thing I've heard about Vista that's actually made me stop and reconsider my decision to stay the hell away from it... but is it enough?

Neat feature, yes. Earth shattering, no.

quicksilver.

So are you saying this feature is worth the $200-$300 to upgrade from Windows XP? I have yet to see a compelling argument that will get me to cough up the money to upgrade to Vista.

About the only thing that is going to get me to upgrade is when I see "For Windows Vista Only" on software.

Sheesh, here I thought I was happy with Lanuchy, which helps me launch apps in less than a second. Lanuchy is great for replacing the start menu, but it does nothing else (and doesnt intend to). It is so quick so usually I dont even see the launchy window before I entered F (for Firefox) and pressing Enter.

But now I want Quicksilver, it is very innovative and I havent seen anything like it. Good jobs by those guy(s)!?

Is it just me or is Windows becoming more of a console? The only reason I keep using it, is that I want to play games :/

I don't quite get the hullabaloo. I've been using ctrl+esc+r and typing merrily away for everything I do for years, even to get to executables. For extremely long paths I will usually eventually just make a batch file that launches the extremely long path in whatever manner I want it to be launched. Just put the batch file somewhere in my path (usually c:\bat) and I'm back in business. I use my mouse so infrequently at work that I have a left-handed mouse setup so that I can keep a pen and notepad by my right hand to take notes while I work.

I suppose this vista feature saves me trouble of making hundreds of little batch files, if it works right. But now I see that several people above have mentioned Launchy, which I think I'll take a look at.

well, hell of a feature!

i have a linux-box with wmii window manager running (some 500 kB + 1.5 GB linux and useful apps = roughly 1.5 GB; not 6 GB only for an OS. this is insane!) and it has (almost) the same feature. plus auto completion by hitting (try this - i would not bet that it works in your feature). i do not use my mouse anymore, except for surfing in the inet. furhter, no start menu at all. clear useability.

btw, the "typing feature" is known since the first days of modern computers and it has long been pointed out that typing is in most cases faster and more efficiently than pointing with a mouse and scrolling through a hell of menus.

so, if thats the best feature vista has, i'm not impressed.

with regards AS

Not sure why people think this is the only feature in vista, he jsut happend to blog about this, stop making stupid deducations about upgrading or whatever from one article.

If you want a compelling reason, here it is, everything < Vista will be obsolete, no new games will run on it because they move to DX10, no new hardware will run on it because it's so easy for manufacturers to use the unified driver model...etc...etc

Vista is not about search or the stupid glass interface, it's about all those things they chnaged "under the hood" which will pretty much force us all to upgrade as usual with Windows, wheter we like to or not.

And, in case you don't know, the Vista search feature will be released for XP as well, there is a beta right now at:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/desktopsearch/default.mspx

Searches exactly the same way and uses the same search syntax.

I'll take the Microsoft version over shareware anyday. Good article.

Good tip Jeff! I'll have to try it out and see if I like it better than SlickRun. Took me long enough to get into the habit of using SlickRun, so using something else will be a challenge.

Everybody else mentioned it's just a copy of Quicksilver/Spotlight and their derivatives. But I'd like to point out that I've been doing a lot of this stuff for years on plain-old Windows. It's amazing to me how few people know the power of the Run box, accessed quickly with the key combo Win-R.

Even back in Windows 95 days I could do:

Win-R notepad (bring up notepad)

Win-R C: (open up explorer on the C: drive)

With Win 98 and everything after, it became a lot more powerful, because they added auto completion. Now you can do things like:

Win-R My [down arrow] (Open up My Documents)

It's still not as powerful as the Quicksilver-like features described above; but I'm amazed that more people aren't using these shortcuts.

Ouch! I guess I've never seen so much crap thrown towards Jeff in a simgle blogpost. Another one! Jeff! Duck!
Guys, you should know Jeff doesn't lick MS boots, but he's a windows oriented developer, what did you expect? Reviews about the new osx 2.3.2.1.2.3.4.5.7?
He found a feature worth telling to us, guys who don't have vista betas
As much as I hate paying hundreds of dollars for an OS I don't need (and shouldn't need, except for that damns compatibility issues MS creates on purpose) I will get someday a PC with vista included, and it's nice to know ms is not going only downhill.
I also love my keyboard, but I will probably miss the mouse-clicking start menu. You don't know what you had till you lose it, right?

Oh my goodness. Who would have thought that revealing a well-done feature in Vista would cause so many negative comments about Windows in general?

I have been running Vista exclusively at work (and Vista and OS X at home) for about 2 months now. When I go back to XP or Server 2k3, it feels like going back into the dark ages. But when people ask me what's better, or why they should switch, it's incredibly hard to point to individual features that are compelling. It's a whole *experience* that is better. It feels cleaner, and I feel like I'm more in control of everything.

Yes, it has its faults. But I say fewer faults than XP.

There are so many little minor things that make me happy every day:

* Far fewer reboots
* Much faster startup time (like 10 seconds from poweroff to login)
* Windows button, type, launch
* Windows key + number for QuickLaunch shortcut (awesomeness)
* Sidebar and gadgets (writing them is fun, too)
* Much, much better plug-n-play support
* Big remote desktop improvements
* Hibernate actually works
* Switching between wireless networks, wired, and differen domains works seamlessly

These are all pretty minor things. But when you put them all together, it's just a better OS. Using XP every day (especially coming from a Mac OS background) was frustrating quite a bit of the time. I am so much less frustrated now, using Vista.

Perhaps the most important thing though, is that I feel like I get more work done in less time. Why that's the case is hard to explain--perhaps over time it will become more readily apparent.

If you don't want to upgrade, don't upgrade. But Jeff pointing out a nice feature (even if it exists in 3rd party things) is not a reason to start bashing the OS wholesale.

P.S. Keep in mind that Apple stole many, many features from indie shareware/freeware developers over the years also (Panic comes to mind).

Mind you, having any typing at all in Linux is claimed to be its major problem. If you'd been doing this from a Linux command line, you could have typed st-TAB and the menu would pop up all the programs beginning with st*. Or using Fluxbox on Linux, I customize my desktop menu so it only shows what I use, and can summon it with a single keypress.

It never ceases to amaze me how features that have been standard in Unix for decades are derided as crocks, then stolen into Windows, where they're suddenly praised.

I am going to try one of the free tools that provides the functionality that you describe.

However, I don't see the start menu as being a problem. I mean, do people _really_ have their start menu arranged as in the screen-shot in your April 24, 2005 article? Of course everyone would have difficulty with a menu of 65 items, but if you look at the way the start menu is done when you first install windows, you'll see that things are in categories (i.e. Games, Accessories).

If you put items into, say, 8 categories, then everything will be in easily used menus of no more then 10 items.
As an example...
http://derbysite.com/TempImages/StartMenu.PNG

@Penguin Pete
When and where did Linux have this feature ?? Command line has always been in windows in one form another, if we are going to talk about things stolen (like two people could never get the same idea about something, so tired of this crap) look at the major desktop for Linux and tell me where that inspiration comes from ?

I haven't completely given up on pointing as a control metaphor. But until the computer interface we see in the film "Minority Report" becomes reality, it will probably continue to suck.

We point at things in real life all the time. I think the problem we see with computer interfaces is that the mouse-and-pointer are a horrible metaphor for the physical pointing we are so accustomed to. But if we could use both hands, multiple fingers, and maybe even some gestures, I think things would be a lot different.

Even if I have no intention of upgrading anytime soon, it's always worthwhile to read blog posts like this because the comments will invariably point to a number of other solutions to the same problem. So it's a win anyway.

KingOfDerby, yes, 99% of software installs itself into the root, in a folder named for the software or the company that made it. Virtually nothing will put itself into a category folder, and I've seen dozens of folks' computers with incredibly badly laid-out start menus from the junk they've installed.

Sure, you can categorize them yourself - I do - but it's an egregious failure that software refuses to.

It's amazing to see how many people talk crap - and look what you can do with this or that. Or the mac or linux. Geeez folks do you have really nothing better to do than pounce on anything Windows even if it is something useful? Let's face it it's been a long time since *any* operating system has done anything truly innovative and not taken a feature that some third party hasn't previously implemented.

Think what you will this is a useful feature and many people agree with Jeff including myself. Revolutionary? No, but you know the things that make life easier often aren't revolutionary...

killer app? you mean spotlight which came out like 2 years ago?

step away from vista

Many people are posting that other applications provide the functionality that this does, and they do. Sort of.

But trust me when I say that they don't have the speed and ease of use that this does.

Press the winkey and its there, all loaded and ready to go, type some things and press enter, and you don't even have to wait for the thing to refresh, it will just go and run the first result it finds. The fact that I can now run programs in less then a second is very important.

It may seem like small thing, but trust me, when you have had it, its hard to live without it.

Windows XP has the "just type what you want to run" interface, too; it's called Command Prompt. I use it all the time. Its tab-completion isn't up to Linux/Vista standards, but it's more than usable.

There's also something the advocates for the "search everything" misses and that's the fact that you have to remember something about what you want to find.

You have to remember the names of the programs and you have to type it correctly (type ntpad or xplorer, how stupid is that?)

And I still havent seen how this is supposed to work on for example chinese keyboards when most programs (even made by non english developers) have english names.

It's just an old way of doing it, like I said, the search is a great complement but should absolutely not replace the folding menu, unfortunately in Vista it has and all we are left with is a scrolling programs menu which is kind of a big sack where everyhting goes, impossible to keep ordered and find anything in.

They could at least have given people a choice to enable the old style XP folding menu (not talking about classic mode).

Or type "readme" and see a list of like 50 readme.txt without any extra information about the folder it belongs to or anything else to separate them.

So, what happens when you end up installing another program that starts with "not"? The next time you attempt to run notepad you may end up running "notathing.exe" when you type "not".

Yes, OS X has Spotlight. All you have to do is throw away your PC, rewrite your code to work on OS X and revamp your organization to run on Apple computers. It's a cinch!

It would be nice if fan boys had more sense than emotion.

Jeff:

Sorry to add another "me too", but you really, really need to play around with Quicksilver.

It'll blow your mind.

"Or type "readme" and see a list of like 50 readme.txt without any extra information about the folder it belongs to or anything else to separate them."

If I remember correctly, there is a tooltip that gives you the file path when you hover. In Spotlight when you view "all results" it shows the file name, and the full path to the file in another window, I imagine there is something similar in Vistas...errr...start-search bar. What the heck are we calling that thing anyway? Start++? Start#?

As for remembering something about what you are searching for. Let us not forget Vista Commandment # 3 "Be Discoverable" ( http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/aa904980.aspx ) and let us hope that app devs remember this commandment too and hold it sacred. (more info here http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/aa904975.aspx#CTA3 )

I'll echo Rick S. sentiment from above. I find myself caring less and less about who came up with what first and more whether or not it's available in a platform I'm using. BeOS had amazing media capabilities for it's time, but I wasn't running it so I didn't care. Anything that gets me closer to feature parity on my chosen platforms is double plus good to me.

this comment might be coming a bit late to be of any assistance, but for everyone who loves pointing instead of typing, the vista start menu still acts an awful lot like the XP start menu.

There isn't any reason that you HAVE to type, you can drill down through hierarchical menus, just like you could in previous versions of windows. you can click the 'start' button and then click on your favorite app, if you're into doing it that way. Vista doesn't make you choose between typing and pointing.

SUSE 10.2 has the same feature in their SUSE menu :)

off topic here, I was happy when Apple integrated the spotlight menu into OS X, but was disappointed with its speed and overzealousness. It would start to search before I was done typing, and usually the sudden cpu surge would result in a 1-4second hangup, even on a high end machine. I stuck with launchbar which isn't free, but works amazingly well. It does everything I need it to including launching apps, songs, urls, emails, sites etc. I tried quicksilver long ago and found it to be too complicated, as well as eating up large chunks of cpu even in the background.

Here's an interesting experiment - a blank post titled Vista. See how many comments you get. Lots of canned responses here.

I like the Vista launch feature, but I'm still using Colibri quite a bit because it does fuzzier matching. For instance, I can type "vs5" and it finds Visual Studio 2005. The Vista launcher matching isn't as friendly.

Vista does seem to be learning which programs I run most often (as does Colibri), which is pretty cool.

Note that at least the KDE (one of the two major linux/unix desktops) equivalent of the start menu *really has had* this exact feature for quite a while now?! I'm not talking about the linux command line here (don't forget just because the windows command line sucks, doesn't mean all command lines suck) - the actual GUI "K" menu does this.

Only, we never thought to trumpet it from the rooftops as some amazing new feature... Geez. It's a minor usability thing, one of the many,many things that makes a Linux/KDE workstation a heck of a lot more pleasant to use than a windows box...

So, the typical "linux" start menu does already do, well, exactly this.

look at the major desktop for Linux and tell me where that inspiration comes from ?

Amiga, RiscOS, Be, Mac, mostly. Microsoft are followers, not leaders, there's really not that actual imitation of windows in linux desktops, just convergent evolution and in some distros, defaults tuned for ex-windows-users.

I have written an application that does just what this new Vista feature does plus have seen many many more great applications done by others which of course are mentioned.

But what I see may be a problem with Vista that haunts XP is that activating the start menu with alot of information in it can take alot of resources. Right now on my XP box with 3.2Ghz and 2 GB or RAM and opening the Start Menu is a bit doggish. If I turn off all my sytles it comes up quick.

So in the end. Will Vista start menu have better performance so your not waiting for the results of what you typed like when your waiting for the menu to load after you just clicked in XP?

My 2 cents.

> But trust me when I say that they don't have the speed and ease of use that this does.

Trust me when I say some do

> Press the winkey and its there, all loaded and ready to go, type some things and press enter, and you don't even have to wait for the thing to refresh, it will just go and run the first result it finds. The fact that I can now run programs in less then a second is very important.

QuickSilver says hello. Defaults binding to ALT+SPC, just press, type whatever you want, press enter, everything is instantaneous.

This must be your first post after getting your free laptop.

I wouldn't upgrade to Vista for this for sure! I've been using Quicksilver (Mac) and AppRocket (Windows) for years. Also, I personally believe web 2.0 (primarily AJAX+DHTML) has dealt the final blow to Windows and beguns its gradual demise. I think Windows will be considered in 5 years what mainframes are considered now -- legacy/dinosaur.

Is that a TI-99/4A Wumpus I see?

Reminds me of the Gnome Deskbar which I've been using for a few years:

http://raphael.slinckx.net/deskbar/screenshots.php#current

the yunguns are getting more amusing all the time. some one of them gets all gooey over a feature of VT-100 database applications from about 1985. gad.

i suppose these folks also voted for Bush.......twice.

The Ferrari comments are funny. As a Windows Developer, wouldn't you think it's more likely that Jeff has an MSDN subscription, which made Vista available a long time ago. Especially considering he has earlier Vista posts prior to the Ferrari scandal.

(Yes, I'm bored waiting for my Vista machine to reboot. It's hung on "Shutting down...")

You really need a checkbox for a comment post that asks "Are you a fanboy?" and if they check it to disallow them from posting.

The point stated wasn't to compare the Vista search capabilities to other OS's and/or applications, but rather to compare it to previous versions of Windows. I don't care if KDE or OSX uses the same sort of search feature yet came out with it earlier. I'll use the same analogy I use when people say that someone in the software industry "stole" a concept from another company.

How do majority of us get to and from work? Cars. Manufactures of which throw ideas back and forth constantly yet no one scrutinizes them for "stealing" ideas. Get your fanboy heads out of your asses and get back into the real world. If companies didn't take advantage of a good concept there wouldn't be any initiative to make products any better.

Back on topic, I think the Vista search is a valuable, time saving component. I didn't notice much of a search lag, especially considering how long searches took in pervious versions of Windows.

"Windows Vista gets criticized a lot in the press, mostly for not being OS X ... But Vista has one killer feature up its sleeve ..."

Was this post a joke?

@brad
You obviously havent tested Vista, there is no programs menu like the one in XP, thats the whole point.

As for you others, my good, we know that there are other search enabled programs, what of it ? What is you beef ? You think someone has patent on search ? A bar where you type ? Get real.

And no, this is not the first time there is search in windows, like pointed out a million times youc an isnatll other stuff, or ms desktop search on xp, so what was "stolen" here ? Man, get a life.

>I wouldn't upgrade to Vista for this for sure! I've been using Quicksilver (Mac) and AppRocket (Windows) for years. Also, I personally believe web 2.0 (primarily AJAX+DHTML) has dealt the final blow to Windows and beguns its gradual demise. I think Windows will be considered in 5 years what mainframes are considered now -- legacy/dinosaur.<

Set your clock.

So you think Windows will not adapt and provide for your web 2.0 or 3.0 or 4.0? Come on, AJAX+DHTML is what makes you sleep good at night? 5 years from now those 2 things will be as cool as JavaScript+IE6. 2 years ago could you say Firefox was not going to revolutionalize the browser industry.

Pa..lease.

> The point stated wasn't to compare the Vista search capabilities to other OS's and/or applications, but rather to compare it to previous versions of Windows.

Actually no, when the previous paragraph talks about Vista being criticized compared to other OS' and the current one suddenly talks about a "killer feature", the mentioned "killer feature" shouldn't be available in any other OS, and in previous versions of the target OS through the use of third-party tools.

Well, it's most for the security at two levels; a copy of the unix system. That gives you a better chance to avoid viruses. You been ask two times and even three before clic on the ok button. Also what do you install is mostly not accepted by the system and the levels of acccess are pretty much like layers where the software is analyse. Also, the installation are made a way that you are severely direct to thoses paths of safe spaces of security. The only thing that will stop me from getting, it is money. I wont pay 500.00 dollars for Ultimate...(I remember Multimate). Sorry Bill... And again, i have already 5 licenses from Microsoft 98, 2000, Visual studio.net 2003. The new Office 2007 does what more? Linux is becoming more userfriendly and you know IT BILL!
You have all the money you need. Microsoft doesn't need to sell the software anymore. Just invest your actual money. Give us a rest. Who care's if it looks like OSX; there partners, anyways.

It's like coke and Pepsy. Vote for democraps(like it)or RepubliCaines. Last night. I was watching Condoleza whith all respect for ascension for a black woman to a higher position(i steelremember what they did to the other black star). By the way i'm not black. And i see that the Congress can't stop the idiots at the white House.

well locate on linux has been around forever and now with beagle in the linux world were it searches in the files and webpages its computing heaven

though MS goes and finally catches up on something that has been around for a long time on a real OS

from PL:

"@brad
You obviously havent tested Vista, there is no programs menu like the one in XP, thats the whole point."

Here's a screen shot that I scrounged up:

http://www.zdnet.de/i/news/200503/gallery_windows_vista/200507_windows_vista_01-ig.jpg

Notice the 'All Programs' button at the bottom. It's pretty much in the same place that you'll see it in XP. clicking on it lists all your programs: it displays the same data that was in XP. The fact that it's displayed in a list instead of a problematic flyout menu is merely cosmetic. you can navigate the list by pointing in ways which are trivially different from XP.

> "You have to remember the names of the programs and you have to type it correctly (type ntpad or xplorer, how stupid is that?)"

Actually that's not quite correct. I'm not sure how the Vista menu works but I imagine it's similar to Launchy which does not require you to type perfectly consecutive letters. So for "Microsoft Visual Studio 2005" I can type "vs2" or just "v5" and get the right result. "Nero Burning ROM" I can type "nbu". "ntpad" or "xplorer" would definitely turn up the right results.

Again, I'm not sure if Vista's start menu does this, but if not then MS had better get cracking (I think it's really just a simple regex to code).

So in that sense, it really is a major improvement. You do have to remember part of the name, but if you can't remember the name of the program you want to open then I don't think an enormous point-and-click list is going to help you either; not unless it's very well-organized like a shopping site.

To run the task manager, type 'task'..... opps, nothing. Ok keep going, 'task manager'. Nothing relevant.

Turns out you can get task manager run if you type 'taskmgr.'.

Go figure.

Lanuchy works fine for me, and it didn't take 6 years and a bagillion dollars. If this is the best feature M$ can come up with after all that investment, we are all truly screwed...

This is awesome. I'll still need SlickRun for command lines with parameters, but I'm with you - I don't think I'll discover any better feature.
The thing is, we're in the minority. As in 0.0000001% of user's will care about this even if they know it's there.
Fact is people associate "point and click" with "computer". I'm very surprised this is in Vista. Probably only because programmer types at MS could slip it in easily due to the new storage/search model.

I guess I've just become so accustomed to keeping one hand on the pointer thingy and one hand the button thingy and work well with my method that this doesn't really seem that big of a deal for me. I'll just have to work with Vista for a while and see what I think. I haven't even looked at many screenshots to even know what it looks like just sitting there.

It may not be compelling, but it looks like it might make productivity improve. Next is GENERAL PUBLIC ACCEPTANCE. Not everyone will use features like this, so power users and geeks will love it. Other people (novices, everyday joes, etc.) will probably never use it. I know my wife, mother and mother-in-law won't. The mouse is "much easier."

What would make this better for some of the "everyday joes" is to create a tutorial on this or other features and include aliases for their favorite programs. That one's been done before, I'm sure with how much success though. Kinda like shortcuts and batch files, just makes a program name something a user can associate with.

Hey is it just me, or have you turned the formatting of your blog to "clear-type"? Clear-type is crap. Please return to good old serif/normal fonts.

Ah, so Windows has come full-circle!

typing (command line) -> point & click (Windows on DOS kernel) -> BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH -> point & click (Windows on NT kernel) -> BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH -> Now we're going to being typing commands again -> mY pRREDICTION: bLUE sCREEN oF dEATH

So, we have variations of this feature in other OSes and third-party tools. That's nice, but useless for 90%+ of computer users. Why? They use Windows out of the box because they don't have the confidence or aren't allowed by their IT depts to install the apps that supply these features. They will *never* have this feature if Windows doesn't provide it. While this might not be an earth-shattering feature in its own right, IMHO it will have far more impact on computer-usability than any of the other solutions mentioned above. That counts for something.

Amazing! Thanks for your time Jeff! Been reading you for a while now and enjoy your insightful comments. I always love the anti Microsoft people out there. Yes, there are other things out there, some better some worse, some can't even be compared. Who cares who came up with it first? My IT department issues Windows based computers so it isn't like I have a choice. When they decide to upgrade us to Vista well then I get to learn all the new stuff. I, as previously mentioned by somebody, keep one hand on the button thingy and the other on the pointy clicky thing. I get my work done, my boss signs my paycheck and I get to go pay my creditors. Is OsX better than XP, UNIX, LINUX, BEOWOLFE? I do not care so quit whining about it.

Craig

@brad
Yes, there is a useless scrolling programs list, not a folding out piitn and click menu that youc an keep organized and that folds out your folders that you created to keep things organized.

This is a sack where everyhting goes, and you have to SCROLL it to see your programs, it's absolutely NOT the same as in XP, it's useless.

If i am not mistaken all series 60 Nokia's have this same text feature when using the contacts. type in a say 'van' and it will bring up anybody with a first middle or last name beggining with van.

this is not miracle feature but i can see it will be useful.

Version 2 of my Find and Run Robot is now open for beta testing and will go public in the next week. In addition to the kinds of features you have been talking about it includes regular expression aliases to let you perform email sending, internet searching, an advanced autocomplete feature, directory searching, search modifier keywords, hotkey support for custom menu lists.

Although it has a TON of heuristic scoring and other options, it runs right out of the box with default options and no configuration required:

http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/findrun/index.html

It's donationware (free but sign-up at our forum is required).

It's a big step forward to have "Programs" listed at the top and always distinct from everything else.

I used to really like Windows Desktop Search on XP for launching programs, but ever since I included my e-mail in the index, it's become useless for reliably finding programs because the number of e-mails usually overloads the list and the programs never get displayed.

I was worried that Vista would also exhibit this behavior, but it looks like it won't. Excellent. I'd pay the upgrade price just for this one feature, actually, because I like it so much :)

The only issue I'm concerned about with "typing trumps pointing" is that people can't spell which could make searching harder. Won't frustration levels rise if people drop and no results are returned?

Are we going to see Google's "Did you mean" in the Start Menu?

In the current form you do have to type correctly, it does not correct misstakes which makes it even more useless. You have to remember what you want to search for and type it correctly, not very user friendly compared to a point and click folding menu.

In conclusion, typing may trump pointing for computer geeks, not for the general public that just wants to find and start their programs quickly and easily.

After using Vista for a couple of months it does feel liek this system needs a servicepack before it's even released, lots of things that feels unpolished and not thought through properly.

First off, my sincere apologies if some of this stuff has already been said. I would normaly read all the posts but I don't have time.

The advantage of typing to launch a program is very significant. When you are launching a program you know what you want.
With point and click you then have to find what you want, then click it. This is a) Made worse by navigating hidden trees, which then forces you to organise it well - hence the largely flat system in Vista one would assume b) Made worse by having a lot of items to search through.
Now consider you know exactly what you want. You press a key (yes, launch should idealy have a dedicated key on the keyboard. But alas, it's too late for that unless you override the caps lock or some such) and then just type what you want. Launch Key - notepad etc. There are several advantages. a) It is by far much, much quicker than searching through menu's, for anyone of any skill. If you are a slower typer, you are more than likely going to be slower at searching and navigating a tree. b) It doesn't break your train of thought by forcing you to search. All the time you are still focused on the task at hand - opening nodepad and typing a phonenumber. opening calculator to do a sum.

My big problem with Vista's start menu search is that most people use the mouse to click the start menu. So people will have to switch back and forth between the keyboard and the mouse to launch a program, which negates one of the big advantages of typing to launch.
It's an exciting step forward, but not without it's flaws.

so the guys at MS finally discovered that we can more easily do repetitive things fast when we type than when we click. Wonderful!

Now maybe in IE8 and in notepad-vista i will be able to experience the nice "typed and found" approach that we have in Mozilla/Firefox for years and in emacs/vi/less for decades ^_^

BEyond being sarcastic, that's truly a great thing that people will no longer be dependent on the pre-organized way things are presented à la XP. "recent documents" list are great, but they require you to read through it every time. When i type gi[TAB] ba[TAB]wa[TAB] and see it completed in "gimp backgrounds/wallpaper.jpg", i only need to check the computer did what i intended, not search how i should tell it.

Jeff,

This isn't actually "typing trumps pointing" - this is "*search* trumps pointing". The reason it works so well is not just that you're typing - remember all the commands from the old command-line days? I certainly don't - but because typing is the fastest way to access search.

If someone found a faster way to search using pointing (say gestures, or "pointing recognition" where it recognises the pattern of your clicking and suggests the targets to you) then pointing would suddenly trump clicking again.

Of course the ultimate killer would be the predictive approach - where the computer sees what you've done, and predicts what you are most likely to need next and offers it to you. *That* would be killer.

I can think of a lot of stuff that would trump searching for programs and much more innovative. How about for example integrating a touch screen into keyboards and when you install a program it would show an icon on the keyboard.

I don't belive in search as a way to launch programs, it's suefull for other things but when it comes to launching programs there are a lot of problems with it.

Jeff,

I guess the only thing I can think of is that it removes having a tool like slickrun installed. I do not use the start menu at all anymore due to the way that I have customized slickrun for my work pc, so I can see the desire for this, but I dunno if for Vista to have it built in is a must have.

Kinda late to the discussion, but the built-in speech recognition seems promising as well. I've been using a crummy microphone to try it out and I bet with a decent headset it would be reliable for real use. Saying "Start Word" from whatever activity you're in is also a pretty fast way to launch an application...

Speech recognition does seem to be pretty good. I don't know how often it would get used though, many people are in office environments etc.

Two more annoying things:

If you search for files the top result is not highlighted, only programs are slected so that you can press enter.

All the included windows programs have translated names in other language versions and if you search on the english name you get no matches which makes it really hard to google for answers. Would it have been hard to put the english name as a "tag" on the shortcuts so that you could search on the sme name across all langauge versions ??

anyone seen ENSO ?
looks impressive, unfortunately only paid version available

http://humanized.com/products/

cheers

Jeff, I am trying to send this great article to some friends, with a quote from the article, but anything after the first picture is impossible to select. Nice, Hunt the Wumpus icon, btw. Reminds me of the old TI-99/4A. :)

That's because it is from the TI 99/4a..

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/files/wumpus_origin.htm

IE6 has trouble with selecting HTML. Do a view source, there's nothing unusual there. I recommend switching to IE7 or Firefox.

Whatever is good in Vista is nice to see, but I cannot accept all the DRM and freedom restrictions that MS has shoveled into it.

I will not buy Vista until all that stuff is removed, or until MS sends a couple of thugs to drown me unless I do. And Windows Genuine Advantage doesn't make ME feel advantaged.

Ya because the future is full of typewriters and people typing is very hip and progessive. Except that OS X has Quicksilver and Linux has Catapult, so this is still the last one to the game.

Well, if you want to get the old school menu back in Vista, right click on the start button, select properties, change the setting and bob's your uncle.

Keyboard entry shouldn't take anything GUI away.
other than you will seldom have to have your hand
on the mouse.

My search engine has inset numeric keypad abilities
for the left and right hand.

I have been hounding them at channel9.msdn.com about:

"Does your GUI design, ignore the KeyBoard?"

(free) program's that work just like the vista search property:
- Colibri, SlickRun, Launchy, Keybreeze
- http://www.keybreeze.com/

Do you only have one hand or something? Why are you so ridiculous about using a mouse?

OMG THIS INFURIATING AND IMPOSSIBLE MOUSE CENTRIC START MENU, BLAST!

This isn't the 1980s anymore, computers are mouse centric, genius. Live in the now.