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Comment by keithpeter | Hacker News Reader

"The only time I see $UI is when I hit the windows key, type "chro" and hit enter to launch Chrome. In this use case, $UI isn't anything more than a bigger start menu"

  $UI = [Metro|Ubuntu Unity|DWM/dmenu]

Strange how these changes all come along at the same time. Does Mac OS have a text based launcher at all?

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Spotlight. 2005.

Windows 7 is likely my last version of Windows. All I use it for now is occasional gaming and I can't see developers dropping W7 support for a long time unless they're heavily incentivised for some reason by MS. Even at $40 for W8, I'd personally be throwing that money away.

Spotlight is a text based launcher. Cmd-Space amd start typing.

I do the same thing on my Ubuntu PC at work. It does seem like we're in the age where launchers and menus are meaningless. At least Microsoft is doing something to keep icons relevant; live tiles are a godsend on my phone.

When I go from W7/W8 at home and Ubuntu on my PC at work to my XP work laptop, it's just an incredibly frustrating experience. I hear people say the only thing that's changed is the looks, but there are a lot of usability upgrades in the newer OSes.

In all the modern OSes I don't need to know what this app is named or what that setting is called. I can just start typing what I think it is and fuzzy matching figures out when I type "resolution", what I really want is what they call "display".

Spotlight?

Thanks all three parent posters, I had tried to put Spotlight out of my mind (iBook G4 with the appropriate upgrade). I imagine it works a lot faster now.

So that is all three main end user desktop/laptop OSes using type and go interfaces.

In addition to hardware improvements, Leopard also brought speed improvements for app launching in particular.

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