In an unmodified windows it would also show random tabloid news from MSN or affiliates inside the start menu…
It’s no longer meant to be used by computer savvy people. It’s meant for consumers. Literally. People that just consume and do not produce or think.
We are walking a different path now and need to say goodbye to windows and Microsoft.
They paid people good money to design and crate that.
At this point windows is just msys2 to me.
@Jankatarch @mod_pp but msys2 is not windows…
Without these ads how will they fund copilot for 12 more minutes genius?
Probably with all of our data they’re selling.
I always dug into RegEdit to disable this crap. And somehow, each time, it was a different series of steps.
Gpedit: registry keys come and go, group policy is forever
Ok. So you type the correct name of the program. Cause terminal ain’t it. CMD and it opens fine.
There’s literally an app named Windows Terminal and you can see it right there in the screenshot.
Yeah. This is just another in the long long long list of examples or Linux users trying to manipulate things.
Terminal is different from cmd. It’s new in Win11 and has multiple command functionalities(cmd, powershell, powershell7, Azure Cloud shell, customizable profiles, etc), with multitab support. You were in such a rush to insult Linux users you didn’t even check if you were just wrong.
I’ve always opened it with “terminal”.
Terminal is a program, and it can do WSL, powershell and batch. It has tabs and other modern features.Pretty sure CMD only does batch
It also comes with openssh and winget (package manager) by default!
While I prefer my Linux terminal emulators, the Terminal app is one of the few remaining Windows apps I actually like. When I do have to use windows, the first thing I do is customize it. Once you get Chocolatey, WSL, and git installed, dare I say Windows begins to approach a pleasurable CLI experience.
Not in windows. On mac and linux maybe but CMD has been CMD since 3.1.
This is the equivilent of typing “pic fixer” and expectung photoshop to appear.
30 seconds ago I literally just typed in the CMD and hit enter and it opened up my command prompt.
You can use cmd. But in windows 11, terminal is the default shell. It is miles better than cmd and powers hell in that it can run tabbed versions of any shells you have installed. Pyshell, chocolaty, git bash, azure cloud, even anaconda. It is all available in one place and has a lot of quality of life improvements. It’s also not bloated at the same time if you can believe that.
Interesting thing is I’ve been running Windows 11 on the laptop that I purchased for business use for the past I don’t know 4 years or whatever it is that I’ve had it it was one of the early laptops at Costco sold with Windows 11 on it. I use it exclusively for business use in the it world. Mostly so I can turn remote control when I’m configuring system servers etc over to other technicians and I don’t have to worry about what’s on it because in the end I could just wipe the whole thing and not give a shit. But not one person not one technician not one tech desk I’ve worked with and a lot of access to my laptop over the past 4 years give or take has ever even bothered opening that program. Everybody pretty much just uses the command prompt to do all the things are going to do on it. And I suppose if I were actively and admin full time or something for that effect I would use it. But in that case the last time I ran and never Operation center or I was an administrator I ran Linux and just ran terminal over that.
I am an L3 for an MSP. I pretty much exclusively use terminal on windows 11. Tends to be the old guys I work with that use cmd still. It’s fine to have lots of experience doing things the way you’ve always done them. It’s also fine for there to be improvements in the systems we use.
I’ve had “cmd” default to “CmDust.exe” which is a program installed by Codemeter (a hardware dongle licence thing).
Considering I used to type “cmd” and get CmDust.exe, I was happy when Terminal became easier to launch. And Terminal is great to use, imo
You should… check if your info is still up to date before arguing so assuredly. As others mentioned, terminal is the upgrade in Win11. It has much more modern functionality than cmd, and has replaced it and powershell for the right click start button CLI options. Which imo is easier than typing it in.
It’s possible your Windows info is out of date. They’re referring to this app, which is installed on Windows 11 by default (though you can get it on Windows 10).
It’s actually a decent terminal emulator (by Windows standards) that’s pretty customizable. It can even become a terminal for a local Linux VM with WSL.
I think they are referring to the app literally named “Windows Terminal”
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9n0dx20hk701?hl=en-US&gl=US
Yeh, it’s come as standard on windows for a few years now, right?
I don’t ever remember installing it on any windows computers I’ve used and it’s always been there
You can literally see they have Terminal installed in the screenshot. It may not be default but it is certainly on that computer. But a web search is far more important than a program installed on the computer.
It is the default shell application in windows 11 these days. As of 23h2 I believe.
This is why I have a custom shell on my work PC. This is the kind of shit search interface where the local hits pop up quickly after you typed but then jump away to display irrelevant guff like this just as you’re clicking on what you wanted.
I didn’t think you could still get decent custom shells on Windows these days. What do you use?
What I do still have on my one Windows machine I need for a (staunchly annoying Windows only) company I do work for is a launcher program that I have been using for well over a decade. Super resource light and simple. I just don’t use the start menu at all.
I’m using Classic Shell. It’s a bit rough in Dark Mode though.
Ah nice, I thought Classic Shell was dead as of several years ago. Did someone fork it and revive it?
I use Revision from revi.cc
Basic start menu, fewer notifications, lots of options. There’s a slider to disable windows updates, but they still get through sometimes
Litestep was the shit years and years ago!! Last I looked into replacing explorer with a custom shell, litestep was pretty abandoned. What shell are you using? Are there multiple options nowadays?
Explorer7 is decent, allows the Win7 explorer to be used on Win8/10/11. https://github.com/world-windows-federation/explorer7
For an actual custom shell there’s xoblite https://xoblite.net/shell/ tho I haven’t used it personally. I just use bbZero https://archive.org/details/bbZero_install_1.18.0-rc6_mojmir, this still works on Win10 though UWP stuff are broken.
What custom shell? For Windows?
On first glace I thought I’d be looking at the UI of a streaming service. This is so awful
And I bet you it pulled the right Terminal as you typed “term” but as you finish it, it pulls this bullshit.
Is there a word for “a thoughtless action by someone else so incidentally awful that you can’t help but wonder if it’s intentional”?
I mean, I don’t think they’re intentionally engineering it to delay EXACTLY the amount of time it takes for me to begin the process of clicking. That would take thoughtfulness, strategy, research, etc…… right?
…right?
This happens on (mobile) websites all the time. It is infuriating.
The Germans have a word for that, I think they call it Microsoft…
To play devil’s advocate, only people unfamiliar with Windows would look for a terminal that way.
Why? I use the start menu reach for every app that’s not on my taskbar. How else would you do it?
This is how I do it. When I forget that I have it pinned on the taskbar or don’t want to use the mouse. I don’t need it enough on windows to remember the keyboard shortcut.
Terminal the movie seems really obscure
The Tom Hanks one was really good.
Win+R?
Win+X.
I disagree. Being able to slap the windows key and type the name of the program I’m looking for is one of my favorite features of both Gnome and KDE and I wish Windows worked similarly.
Both Gnome and KDE also include a web search. And just like on Linux, you can disable it in Windows Settings.
Both Gnome and KDE also include a web search.
Is it on be default? Because if so I’m glad I don’t use that garbage.
On KDE, it’s just one of the suggestions, I believe, that you could search this term on the web. If you trigger that suggestion, it then opens the web browser to do the search.
As such, searching “terminal” wouldn’t yield a suggestion from a web result that matches, but I’m pretty sure applications are prioritized above other results either way.
That’s good to hear. It continuously amazes me how often search bars in some pieces of software manage to be worse than ctrl-f in a plaintext document.
yes but your distro may have it disabled in their default.
plus windows is supposed to work just like that.
before windows 10 came around at least.
It does… (Or did I’ve not used 25H2). But given the app starts with a w you can see the issue.
It shows up as “Terminal” in the search results, so I imagine that’s what it matches against, even if it is colloquially referred to as “Windows Terminal”…
In gnome you can search for any word of a program name and it will appear in the search result
In KDE I type in “tor” and “factorio” appears above “tor browser”
And? Why shouldn’t I expect to be able to find essential OS tools and settings by using the OS search?
It shows it to you… Just not first option. The app is actually called Windows Terminal, which is why you get it by typing wt.
That’s part of the issue: in the picture is written “Terminal”, so I expect to find it if I search Terminal. I don’t care what is the real name under the hood, I’m searching something for the name you have given me.
You’re not wrong but there’s something very funny about a gaggle of Linux evangelists complaining about it not being obvious what aliases to type to open something
I understand them: I am an old Linux user, used to the command line. In there, once upon a time, a command has only on way to be called, and that way was the name under which the command was known and distributed. Aliases were a personal customization made by the user for his own amusement. I am still under the assumption that if a program is presented to you as X, then X is the command to type to run said program. But I understand this is now not as obvious, even in the Linux world.
One of the hard problems I still have today in Linux is if I’m having trouble with software and need to know what it is actually called, sometimes that is difficult. Like how am I supposed to know the installer is called calamares or the text editor is called leafpad when the OS calls them “installer” and “text editor”
Exactly, that is IMHO a not-so-sane default that some application launcher adopts. Thankfully you can switch to a more “normal” behavior, it’s a flag somewhere in the configuration menus for the application launcher, at least in KDE and in XFCE
Oh there’s absolutely no excuse for it not to open Terminal when you type
terminal. I can’t replicate it on my side but I’ve probably turned that “feature” off ages ago. I’m a little surprised at the downvotes, as I’m making fun of Windows. Linux used to have a reputation for its learning curve, especially knowing CLI commands. Daunting stuff for the average user. It’s better now, and beautifully enough it’s Microsoft’s fuckery with putting unwanted shit in their OS that’s teaching people more about the inner workings of the system they’re using, both pushing them towards gutting the OS, and towards other OSes. In the Lemmy demographic that’s usually Linux, around me it’s actually been Macs, and those are even more egregiously expensive where I live.Another way the esotericness tables have turned: the Windows configuration UIs have similar names, do adjacent functions, and aren’t listed anywhere in one place. You have to know what setting you want and where it’s found. There used to be one Control Panel, and a few advanced tools you could find in the Start menu. Microsoft wants to “modernize” some of these, so they’ve pulled parts of their settings piecemeal into their new Settings UI (which they call an app, I don’t like that). But you still have some settings that are still in the legacy Control Panel UI. You have a ton of settings that are still in standalone legacy settings UIs. Some of them look like Windows 10, some like Vista/7, and there’s a handful that look like Windows 95. You need to know that the display color calibration options in the Settings UI can be overridden by the vendor’s control software (that’s a whole rant), and that what you actually want is a standalone settings window called Color Management. You need to know what operations can be done in Disk Management, Disk Cleanup, Optimize Drives, you need to know that they exist, and you then need to know if the command you want is actually only achievable in
diskpart. I have nothing againstdiskpartbut I can’t tell you which among Terminal, PowerShell, or Windows PowerShell (or any of the x86 variations plural of each of them) is the right place to use it. I can intuitively tell it’s not Windows PowerShell ISE or Azure Cloud Shell though. Yay for computer literacy. I type cmd into the Start menu and it works from there, so I’m content with that. I can’t say Raspberry Pi OS has this many configuration locations but once you know the two or three places to look you’re done.I know that I will have to move to Linux eventually. I’ve only complained about things in Windows that aren’t designed to abuse the users directly, which is a drop in the bucket, ethically at least, when you look at the responsibilities of the world’s most (or second most) influential company regarding personal computing. But I look at all this and feel like it’s accelerating the scary trend of younger people getting worse with computers. I was able to follow instructions correctly in a novel computer environment to set up a mini homelab with a bunch of Linux servers talking to each other. People my own age and slightly younger at work seem to know fuck all about the computers we use and that terrifies me. We were supposed to get better over time, not worse! There’s a new, younger IT guy, he’s not much younger than me, and half of what I’m procedurally required to ask his help on is something he doesn’t understand at all.
Home server mountain hermit life is no longer over the horizon for me, that’s all I can say really.
Afaik PowerToys has this Spotlight ripoff which searches for apps.
It’s based on an older version of Vox:
Yeah I don’t know why people who call going on the internet without using uBlock rawdogging use windows without running some script to gut all of this trash.
2025? I don’t remember the search in the start menu working correctly since windows 8
That was when they broke it.
I was working at MSFT when they rolled out Windows 8.
Basically broke all internal workflows for a month or two.
Then quickly had to re-enable the 7 UI they told even us employees did not exist in 8.
They did some kind of hackjob, called that 8.1, and fast forward a decade, Windows 11 had, last time I checked at least 4 different ‘eras’ of UI schemes/frameworks, if you dig far enough into all the settings menus.
I am not even joking when I say that people literally screamed at me when I used the word ‘refactor’ in a sentence, while on the MSFT campus.
Windows 7 was the last OS I was excited to get.
Im so glad that there a tangible exodus of non techie people moving away from whatever the fuckery MS is doing nowadays.
Come to Linux and find that excitement again
My main gripe with this travesty of a “Start menu” is that it isn’t the Tom Hanks movie of a similar name.
The other is that even if it were, it won’t just play, but rather send you to the shiniest new subscription service to subscribe.
Call me old fashioned, but to me a search in the computers task bar should be a search in LOCAL files only. If I want to find random shit from the Internet I would use a proper search engine. Right now, windows search is just rubbish for both local files and Internet content.
My main gripe with this travesty of a “Start menu” is that it isn’t the Tom Hanks movie of a similar name.
IKR? Probably because that one is called The Terminal and this trash “search” can’t even look around articles.
Best match
Sure thing, bud 😂
It even recognized the local app that matches, how on earth is this a better match
One pays MS per click.
It’s all relative. Best match for their user analytics. So they get good numbers to show user engagement in their board meetings.
Accidental clicks are engineered to juice those numbers too.
