Also, shortcuts such as CMD+A and CMD+U still work. Just type the first few letters, your app is selected, CMD+O to open. Shrug.
Is this Cmd-A and Cmd-U from within Finder? I’m aware of Cmd-Shift for both (being for Applications and Utilities window, respectively), though I’m unfamiliar with just Cmd-only from within Finder, other than to select all items in a window or on the Desktop itself.
At some point though I thought a launcher would do me some good as my hands are usually on the keyboard and I was tired of mousing to the dock. I got in to Quicksilver at that point and on my primary Macs that's what I use (instead of Spotlight). Quicksilver also has the feature of creating app shortcuts. CTRL+F for instance will launch EasyFind.
I really ought to give Quicksilver another go. I briefly trialled it once when the current Mac OS X version was still early in the Leopard days (late ’07/early ’08, as memory serves), but found the setting up for it and tailoring it for my needs was consuming more time than I could set aside (being at university full-time and working two jobs concurrently gave me fleetingly little time back then to tinker with new, everyday productivity software the way I can do now or could do prior to all that). I think the muscle memory of learning to remember which keystrokes could do what in Quicksilver was going to slow me down before it could help me with speeding up the ability for me to work/move faster.
That's stuck with me even during my Intel transition. On my work Mac however, I'm not so inclined to be disabling things so I stick with Spotlight.
Over on the Intel side, such as in High Sierra, I’ve had to disable a lot (starting with Notifications) or alter common-look-and-feel UX elements (like ridding of San Francisco in favour of Lucida Grande) for me to use the system the way I
prefer (i.e., as close to Snow Leopard as one is able to bend the more recent macOS versions). One thing about the more recent iterations which bothers the heck out of me is the “green traffic light” no longer means “maximize window to full height/width” (i.e., the “
+” when one mouses over), but “go full screen” (with the two triangles)
unless one remembers to also hold down Option when clicking it.
I don’t readily know of a way to flip those UI options — much as I don’t know of a way for Preview, TextEdit, and other built-in system utilities to recognize Cmd-Shift-S as “Save as…” and not “Duplicate” or “Save a copy…”. As with the traffic lights, one has to remember to press Cmd-Opt-Shift-S. These are annoying —
:cough: — features I’ll never get along with.
tl;dr: “Don’t mess with what’s worked since the Mac OS days, Apple. Oh no, wait, Jony just walked into the UX/UI room, heck it… 🤦♀️ ”
