Classic Shell: Forum

I love classic shell and it has been a life saver since my company went Windows 8. The speed of classic shell search is awesome and having search give me my most common items first is one of the things I love about classic shell.

However, with the new introduction of categories this doesn't work as well anymore. Unless my search term is in "programs" I have to click down in a lower category even for my more common search items.

Having search segmented by categories is one of the top things I loathe about default Windows 8. It makes things harder to find. I would love it if there were a way to disable this not so great paradigm in classic shell.

I tried to downgrade to a previous version of classic shell to remove the categories, but the mediafire link for 3.9.5 didn't seem to work.

The new search categories is a disaster for me. I search for settings a lot, but now there are lots of program matches for my short substring searches that make the "Track frequency of use" setting completely useless, as "programs" are always put above "settings".
Could you please add an option to disable the categories and do it the way it was done in the pre-4.0 versions?

im also having this problem. could we get any developers opinion on this? will we get an option for this or are we stuck with old versions forever?

Splitting the results in categories speeds up the search. The start menu can show the results as soon as one category is ready, instead of waiting for other categories to be processed.
So no, there are no plans to change the behavior because it will reduce the search performance.

So you won't even give us the option to choose to sacrifice a little search speed in favor of saving a lot more time (and frustration) by getting the correct top results?

As for search speed, well, for me the old way was effectively faster, because now the results "window" keeps resizing and jumping to accomodate new items found. Not that it matters for speed, both solutions finish before I release the key I just typed, but the old solution was more friendly to my eyes as everything appeared simultaneously.

It is not a matter of option. The search code has changes significantly between versions 3 and 4. Waiting for both categories to finish before displaying any results is not trivial.
The majority of people run programs a lot more often than settings. So for them the current grouping is quite beneficial.

BTW, you can try creating a folder called "Settings" in your start menu and place shortcuts to the most used settings in it. Then they will be found and displayed in the Programs section. Also their usage will be tracked. There are two downsides. 1) The same item will show in the Settings section, 2) Keywords will not work because shortcuts don't have keywords.

People who use programs more often (me included, I "only" search for settings a few times a day) will still get their mostly searched for programs at the top, won't they?

Anyway, I just downgraded, and it immediately feels much smoother (and even faster even though both are a fraction of a second) as the results window just appears instead of jumping around. It always annoyed me, and now that I remember how good things used to be I won't give it up again.

Bringing up this topic again. Could you please reconsider adding an option to use the old search from 3.6.8? For me the old way has no disadvantages, and the following advantages:
1. My most searched items are brought to the top, regardless of category.
2. It's faster, since it only draws the results once, even if the initial display is slightly slower. The new results window is useless anyway until it finishes searching, because it updates so quickly (I have an SSD).
3. While frantically updating the search results, the results window does a high-frequency flicker between the dark theme I have and a white background. This hurts my eyes.

No. In fact it is even more important then ever to split the searches. Newer versions of Windows have moved some of the settings to the new Metro UI, and they are not searchable through the original method. The menu must query the search index database to find them. That can be slow - SSD or not. Not only that, but the results are ordered by relevance, so they can't be mixed with other search results.

If you are having flickering problems, then it might be a bug with your theme. As a possible improvement, try one of the darker skins like Midnight or Metro.

The fact that the searches happen separately aren't really a concern for the user, is it? My two request are
1. An option to wait until the search (all searches?) finishes and then show everything,
2. An option to group the search results from the different categories into one list so they can all be sorted by frequency of use.