The "What it's like" posts are really cool. Especially enjoyed this account[1] from a content writer who shadowed the CEO during a half-day meeting with a major investor and got to see the impact of their work in a context they never expected:
> Next we met with Vinod, Bruce, and investment partners Brian Byun and Sven Strohband for a company brief and brainstorm session. Sid began with an update on the financials, and detailed our massive growth and expansion both in terms of people and product. There were no slides presented. Instead, Sid used our website as a visual aid. Nearly every question or discussion point was first addressed with a Google search to pull up the appropriate GitLab web page to reference.
[...]
> I’ve been working at GitLab for two and a half years as a content writer on our marketing team and at times have been extremely frustrated with our marketing website—the content on it, how it’s organized, what we’re presenting, etc. It doesn’t look or operate in a way I’m familiar with so my instinct was to not trust it. But nothing we do at GitLab is “normal,” and witnessing our CEO use the website as a single source of public truth to inform our investors is just one example of what it means to be a transparent company.
If you know what you want, text search is much faster than leafing through a list of items. It's what every touch-typist discovers in the first months with their newfound power, especially if they have decent software available—like Spotlight or Alfred.
Whenever spotlight's index gets corrupted (about once every couple weeks), my productivity probably goes down 30%.
Because I find it faster to switch by just spotlight + app name, in many cases even faster than command + tab, because it's kind of an O(1) switch, vs an O(n) switch to cycle through many open apps.
A more important factor in the app-switching use-case, imo, is that Spotlight or Alfred require just static unchanging input, so you can bash it out without second thought, and usually without looking at the displayed result (after learning the necessary text to trigger the app selection). When cmd-tabbing, you have to look at which app is under the highlight ‘cursor’ and where is the one you want, then position the cursor on the desired app—this all keeps visual recognition engaged and requires conscious choice at many steps.
This is also the reason why both mouse-clicking and touch-tapping are slow compared to keyboard typing: you likewise need to look at what is where on the screen, then aim with the mouse or the thumb, instead of just jerking the fingers to keys that are in muscle memory.
You’re absolutely right about not even having to look. When my spotlight index gets corrupted and I command space, type “safari” or “tower” or “iterm” and then hit enter without thinking, it doesn’t find the app but then opens safari with a google search for whatever app. It is always jarring cuz I’m not paying attention to what matched, and instead it opens safari instead of the app window I expected.
To make things worse, I tried switching back to Alfred but it it seems to just piggyback off spotlight for finding apps.
Otherwise I would switch back to Alfred if it just had a “my index doesn’t get corrupted like spotlight” as a feature.
IIRC in Alfred particular folders can be added, to be searched for apps. If this works separately from main search, it might help—you'll probably need to create a folder and dump symlinks to the apps in there.
Otherwise, apps can conceivably be added as keywords or something. Rather annoying since it won't pick up new apps automatically, but oh well. Myself, I prefer Alfred anyway since Spotlight doesn't do too much aside from launching apps, converting currencies and occasionally looking for files (the latter is not so useful when there are thousands of third-party code files on the machine, and Finder is not my IDE anyway).
P.S. Also btw, at least with Alfred, I don't need even a full word for most apps—just two to four letters: i.e. ‘fi’ is Firefox, and ‘do’ is Double Commander. Alfred quickly ranks results higher if they were invoked previously for the same input, so the desired app pops up in the results just after a few letters, and this behavior sticks around without perturbation from re-indexing. This also means that at first it pays to enter those couple letters and select the app with the arrow keys, since Alfred distinguishes between inputs of various length—i.e. might learn for ‘firefox’ but not for ‘fi’.
From the investor's perspective starting from Google is a lot better, and I bet this was done deliberately. It provides him the insight he doesn't need the CEO to find the articles.
> Next we met with Vinod, Bruce, and investment partners Brian Byun and Sven Strohband for a company brief and brainstorm session. Sid began with an update on the financials, and detailed our massive growth and expansion both in terms of people and product. There were no slides presented. Instead, Sid used our website as a visual aid. Nearly every question or discussion point was first addressed with a Google search to pull up the appropriate GitLab web page to reference.
[...]
> I’ve been working at GitLab for two and a half years as a content writer on our marketing team and at times have been extremely frustrated with our marketing website—the content on it, how it’s organized, what we’re presenting, etc. It doesn’t look or operate in a way I’m familiar with so my instinct was to not trust it. But nothing we do at GitLab is “normal,” and witnessing our CEO use the website as a single source of public truth to inform our investors is just one example of what it means to be a transparent company.
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/04/08/khosla-ventures-git...