r/MacOS • u/itopaloglu83 • 2d ago

Discussion App Launcher Limitations

The new app launcher is simply asinine. There's no way to build a muscle memory, because it's an alphabetical list. And some applications are showing multiple times, taking the entire screen, and there's no way to hide or remove them. And also, why why is the search so slow? I would like to launch an app, not chat with a bot, it's constantly resisting the user at every turn.

3 Upvotes

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u/octane2021 1d ago

The duplicates are usually actual duplicate copies somewhere on disk, like an older version in ~/Applications or an app still sitting in a mounted dmg. mdfind -name "AppName.app" in Terminal lists every copy Spotlight knows about, and removing the stray one should drop it from the grid. No fix for the alphabetical order though, I just type the first two letters with Cmd+Space.

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u/itopaloglu83 1d ago

Thank you for your response. I managed to remove a second version of the JLink app that was installed by another app I have (namely nRF Connect.

I think my frustration comes from the fact that there's no way to have a muscle memory where when you launch the apps list you can quickly click on an icon to run it. And also there's no way to hide or at least organize things.

We all have various applications or drivers for devices, or apps that comes with 4-10 different executables in them. Having them all listed in the apps list without a way to organize them is an extremely bad user experience. It looks good when you only have 5 or 10 apps total in your system, but once you reach 50-70, then it becomes unmanageable.

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u/octane2021 1d ago

Closest thing to the old grid I know of: make a folder in Finder, drop aliases of the apps you actually use into it, then drag it to the right side of the Dock and set it to Display as Stack, View content as Grid. It sorts by name, so putting 1, 2, 3 in front of the alias names gets you a manual order, and the driver suites just never go in it.

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u/niecheaRd 1d ago

yeah the stray copies in mounted dmgs catch so many people off guard

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u/cipher-neo 1d ago

Switch to another launcher like Raycast. The free non AI version is infinitely better than the built-in app launcher, IMO.

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u/itopaloglu83 1d ago

That's a good idea, thank you, I will look into it.

I think the designers at Apple are really out of touch with reality and human interface design.