With an exception for Vim, every single editor I use supports great fuzzy searching out of the box: Sublime Text, VSCode, and IDEA (honestly, the only shot I ever had at finding anything in IDEA). What follows below are my attempts at finding reasonable alternatives to this kind of experience in the contexts I care about the most. That is to say: sadly, there is no “fuzzy search for everything”.
#Alfred devdocs software#
Unfortunately, as I’ve written before, software often lets us down by imposing seemingly arbitrary restrictions on which tools can play together.
Having coined this motto, I started a new quest: this time, for a more active way of navigating my Mac. Thinking about this made me realize that I’ve been subconsciously drifting towards similar kinds of navigation in other areas: with Alfred on my desktop, the “smart” address bar in my browser, the history search in the terminal. After a mere day with it, I recognized it as one of the greatest UX breakthroughs of all time: just a few keystrokes easily save seconds of scanning menus and clicking through deeply nested file trees. My first experience with fuzzy search in a development environment was Sublime Text 2. I first attributed that to intellisense and internalized shortcuts, but had to admit that I often neglect both, mainly relying on… fuzzy search. I noticed that I wasn’t as prone to this mindless wandering around within the confines of my programming environments. It would be smart to play to our own strengths, wouldn’t it? This observation daunted me, because computers are amazing at crawling through vast amounts of data while human’s time is much better spent thinking. Later, having admitted my own flaws, I’d watch other people’s screens in the office and at local meetups and notice the same patterns: scrolling, clicking, hovering their mouse pointers over lengthy lists. Over and over again I’d catch myself mindlessly scrolling through a web page looking for an elusive endpoint’s description, or clicking through a multi-level popup menu in order to reach a certain action that doesn’t have a factory shortcut. Looking for the right paragraph to quote, scanning the program menus, locating a file or navigating a hairy codebase: all of these take more time than may seem on the surface. This first issue focuses on one of the most common routine tasks: search.
#Alfred devdocs series#
And today I’m starting a series of posts under a common title “Flow Notes” where I’ll share some of my findings and observations in hopes that they’re useful to others. While I cannot claim that I’ve effectively fused with my computer, I am proud of my progress. I began to document and gradually replace them with more productive new habits. Recently I became aware of some habits that slow me down and occasionally break the flow when I’m behind my Mac.
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