Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No Start Menu for You

randomascii.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 281 posts

Re: No Start Menu for You

#151

Post by Joeri »

Thlom wrote: post #75
zwaps wrote: post #34

I think search is hard generally. I switched to an M1 Mac pro recently, and it has its own set of challenges. For instance, there is no start menu but a search bar called Spotlight. You do your quick math in there (where you'd call calc.exe in Windows). However, it only accepts your query as math... sometimes. Like 50% of the times. Otherwise it searches the web. If you search for a program, it takes just that tiny s…

Huh. I maximize most of my programs. They maximize in a separate desktop and I switch between them with three finger swipe. Also noticed yesterday that you can tile windows left right by long-pressing on the maximize button.

That approach only works on the 13 and 14 inch laptops because the screen isn’t big enough to show more than one application. On anything larger the green button is basically never what I want.

The green button is just a very ill-considered piece of functionality imho. I find window management on macOS too frustrating to tolerate without moom installed.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#152

Post by dhaavi »

Eisenstein wrote: post #144
roel_v wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I should probably look into it more. Can Comodo's firewall be used standalone, i.e. without its antivirus? What I needed from Glasswire was click-to-allow on each network access, I couldn't find that in any product I tried a few years ago before I decided on Glasswire.

> Can Comodo's firewall be used standalone, i.e. without its antivirus? Yep, just pick the firewall from the installers and make sure you uncheck everything except the firewall during the install (they are tricky, these guys): * https://forums.comodo.com/news-announcements-feedback-cis/co... after installing go through and (again) disable everything but the firewall. I also use their firewall to block their firewall…

You might enjoy Safing's Portmaster Firewall then: https://safing.io/

It's open source and is quickly surpassing GlassWire's capabilities.

Disclaimer: I'm Founder/CTO of Safing.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#153

Post by debugnik »

yellow_lead wrote: post #36

There's many other problems with the start menu - specifically search 1) Anything not found opens in Edge™ and not your default browser (WTF?) 2) It loads lazily - so sometimes you hit enter and the highlighted item has already changed 3) Partial searches don't work very well. At this point, I'm wondering if there's a start menu replacement app

About 1), I'm using MSEdgeRedirect [1] to forward "microsoft-edge:" URIs to my default browser. Other browsers were planning to support Edge's URI scheme as well so users could change the default browser for it, but Microsoft updated that option away during Windows 10.

[1]: https://github.com/rcmaehl/MSEdgeRedirect/

Re: No Start Menu for You

#154

Post by badpun »

zwaps wrote: post #34

I think search is hard generally. I switched to an M1 Mac pro recently, and it has its own set of challenges. For instance, there is no start menu but a search bar called Spotlight. You do your quick math in there (where you'd call calc.exe in Windows). However, it only accepts your query as math... sometimes. Like 50% of the times. Otherwise it searches the web. If you search for a program, it takes just that tiny s…

One of first changes I do on a fresh Win 10 install is disabling the web search in start menu. I hope Mac you can do that on Macs as well.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#155

Post by tupac_speedrap »

rightbyte wrote: post #24
martin_ky wrote: post #6

It seems to be a pattern with (not just) Microsoft products to hang the UI while waiting for some remote API, usually talking to the home base. Happens a lot to me with Office desktop apps - they freeze sometimes for a good second or so while starting and more surprisingly also when closing. One time it bothered me so much, that I recorded an ETW and unsurprisingly the time during the hang was spent waiting for some…

I use Win10 at work and the Calc app lags for like 10s when opening before I can type in it. I firmly remember it started to do that after some reboot update ...

I hate the slow right click menu too, why is there a forced delay?

I think visual design peaked a few years ago and now we are deliberately overcomplicating every piece of UI for no apparent reason.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#156

Post by whatatita »

infinitezest wrote: post #140
zwaps wrote: post #34

I think search is hard generally. I switched to an M1 Mac pro recently, and it has its own set of challenges. For instance, there is no start menu but a search bar called Spotlight. You do your quick math in there (where you'd call calc.exe in Windows). However, it only accepts your query as math... sometimes. Like 50% of the times. Otherwise it searches the web. If you search for a program, it takes just that tiny s…

For window management and tiling, I think Rectangle is better than most of the alternatives I've used. And its OSS https://rectangleapp.com/

I use this and love it! It's in my "must have" list of apps I install straight away.

You can install it with brew too: `brew install --cask rectangle`

Re: No Start Menu for You

#157

Post by pixelrevision »

zwaps wrote: post #34

I think search is hard generally. I switched to an M1 Mac pro recently, and it has its own set of challenges. For instance, there is no start menu but a search bar called Spotlight. You do your quick math in there (where you'd call calc.exe in Windows). However, it only accepts your query as math... sometimes. Like 50% of the times. Otherwise it searches the web. If you search for a program, it takes just that tiny s…

Adding software can help.

Alfred can either replace spotlite or run along side it. I’ve found it much faster and easier to use. You can customize it pretty well. (Just don’t download the Mac App Store version as it’s multiple versions behind)

There’s a ton of windows managers out there that help you setup hot keys or modify windows to work how you want. Mac overall is much better with native software not doing its own thing than windows so changes tend to be pretty consistent. I’m using MOOM because it’s on the app store and lets me hotkey all my windows into specific sizes but there’s plenty of other stuff out there depending on what you want to do.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#158

Post by [deleted] »

dhaavi wrote: post #152
Eisenstein wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can Comodo's firewall be used standalone, i.e. without its antivirus? Yep, just pick the firewall from the installers and make sure you uncheck everything except the firewall during the install (they are tricky, these guys): * https://forums.comodo.com/news-announcements-feedback-cis/co... after installing go through and (again) disable everything but the firewall. I also use their firewall to block their firewall…

You might enjoy Safing's Portmaster Firewall then: https://safing.io/ It's open source and is quickly surpassing GlassWire's capabilities. Disclaimer: I'm Founder/CTO of Safing.

[deleted]

Re: No Start Menu for You

#159

Post by gcbirzan »

roomey wrote: post #150

Sorry to be that guy , but this is why XFCE is so good! Them random delays when doing simple things in windows is so frustrating. A desktop should get out of your way, and be so quick you don't notice it. Window switches, minimizing, maximising, launching, closing etc. Or my personal favourite, type and the letters take their time to appear. Only after you have worked with a system that never ever lags on these every…

I honestly don't know what they're talking about, I had a mac until recently and very often I'd get up to 500ms delay in writing in a Chrome text box.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#160

Post by emilecantin »

lelanthran wrote: post #113
Thlom wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. I maximize most of my programs. They maximize in a separate desktop and I switch between them with three finger swipe. Also noticed yesterday that you can tile windows left right by long-pressing on the maximize button.

> Huh. I maximize most of my programs. They maximize in a separate desktop and I switch between them with three finger swipe. That's full-screen, not maximised[1]. It's also something I hate - I make an app full-screen and suddenly it's on a different desktop, so my awareness of what apps are on which desktop is completely gone - I can no longer to ctrl-alt-right twice to get from my golang desktop to my browser desk…

I've used MacOS for about 15 years now, and I almost _never_ use full-screen [1]. What I do instead is group windows in the different desktops by task / context. These windows are mostly sized to take ~80-90% of the screen, but I make them all different sizes and slightly offset from each other. That way I can switch from one another by clicking on the small sliver that peeks out from behind the current foreground window. That type of context-switching is a bit more rare; the most-used action is the 3-finger swipe / ctrl-arrow.

One thing I miss from Leopard is the ability to put your spaces into a grid instead of a line; made for a bit more efficient switching between them.

[1]: The only exception which is pretty much always full-screen is my terminal. I use tmux for multitasking in that "space".

Post reply on HN