Alright, I admit it, I haven't followed Longhorn's feature map. I'm referring to the supposed "search everything" metaphore that they're planning to introduce.
However, quite without intending to, I'm already mostly there. Many of you may know that my primary machine is an Apple Powerbook (12", the better to fit into my bag...). I've used several tools on it that bring search into my everyday use, and they're all really cool.
The first, now deprecated, was called Another Launcher, now known as Butler. This is a handy little Mac OS X tool which lets you set keyboard shortcuts to launch just about anything (bookmarks, apps, I think even contacts). But the defining feature was the ability to set a keyboard shortcut that would search it's list of stuff. It's pretty easy (probably the default, I forget) for all applications in the normal places to be automatically included in this list.
I quickly stopped using the mouse to launch apps. Instead, I typed Cmd-Space, and typed part of the app's name, then enter. It did partial matches, and generally found the right thing. Need Mail? 5 or 6 keypresses, of the easiest non-finger-bending variety would get it for you. Same with Safari, or, more importantly, any of the 20-30 apps I use less than once a day, but still want to have easy access to. And no training myself how to launch each - just the one keystroke needs memorizing.
I used Another Launcher for a long time with happiness, until I ran across a review of QuickSilver. The version I have, apparently an older version than is being tested right now, is still a little green around the corners. But it still takes search up a level. I have it set to index pretty much my entire home directory (well, like 3-levels from home, which is good enough), and all of the sources of bookmarks and applications that I have set up on the machine. It also happens to support reading the Mac OS X address book, among other stuff. Same Cmd-Space assigned to it... Butler had to take a secondary keystroke, 'cause it wasn't as flexible. But, now, I can type part of any document name, application, folder, control panel, etc. and it comes up. I no longer need to know where anything actually is, spatially or otherwise, to get it up on the screen.
This might not be for everyone, but I heavily multitask. And I still plan to organize my documents into useful hierarchies for browsing. But I'll do that once, when I first save the document. From then on, I'll search for my active documents (ones recent enough that I remember what I called them), thank you very much. Browsing is slow, and mentally taxing, compared to instant-find.
Does anyone know about such tools for either KDE or Win32? I'd really like to bring the rest of my operating environments up to speed.
Caveats: Both of these tools only search metadata, which is perhaps less than Longhorn and similar technologies will provide. I imagine that such depth will be useful, but, since it implicitly increases the collision space for short queries, one of the charming elements of the use cases I describe above, I think it's going to need to be a secondary feature. What's lovely about QuickSilver is that, once you've used it a little (search results appear ordered somewhat based on which ones you've used before, if any), it returns a very relevant top-two to an extremely short query. Picking the right one is easy. If that relevance dropped even to top-5, I think its usefulness would drop significantly.
