I'm one of those people that manages their tools and tasks essentially by remembering where things are, physically and spatially, and the way a lot of software is design actively fights against that

like, I'm a big user of desktop spaces for organising my work

macOS makes that really hard to do effectively simply because of what cmd-tab does

slack makes it hard by not letting me open each thing I'm following in its own tab, so I'm always losing track of things

it's like trying to get work done while having to constantly walk around the office

I have one browser window for each task I'm working on, roughly, spread across many desktops. restart chrome and all that gets tipped back into one workspace and I have to sift through it again

a lot of software has gravitated to this model where you just search for things, and I cannot get across just how much that does not fit my brain

to me, search is where information goes to die

search is fine for open-ended unknown data sets: oh, I wonder if there's an article on <thing> -> search -> great

for things I own, which I know exist, and have a mental model of, it is *garbage*

search breaks my brain partly because it has no analog in the physical world, people do not search for things in real life, in the sense they do on a computer

they browse, they scan, they skim, they explore, they categorise and retrieve, they do not search

yes there are things people do that we call "searching" but none of them correspond to what "search" denotes in software

what do we call "searching"
- looking for a specific thing we lost, which involves linearly navigating a space looking for it
- browsing for things we don't know exist, as in a shop, also a linear process
- retrieving objects from known locations, sometimes using an index

- retrieving known objects from unknown locations, which usually is indirected through a map of some kind, e.g. a literal street map, or a card catalog

this last one is close to what "search" means on a computer sometimes, but most computer searching does not correspond to any of these modes of behaviour

imagine if you wanted to find any of your possessions at home, and all of them where hidden and you could only locate them by describing them sufficiently accurately

that's... not how people use their possessions

in fact this mode of use is particular to the situation where you've lost something and you're trying to get someone else to help you find it

I... don't want that process but for everything?