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Fluent Search

by Adir Hudayfi

About Fluent Search

Fluent Search is a productivity launcher for Windows — a Spotlight-style search bar that reaches across applications, windows, files, browser tabs, on-screen text, and in-app content from a single keystroke. Built and maintained as a passion project by Adir Hudayfi, the application has grown across 68 releases into one of the most polished search experiences on Windows.

When Adir set out to build it, he benchmarked Avalonia against WPF, picked Avalonia, and never looked back. This is the story of why.

4.5★

Microsoft Store rating

Releases shipped

3×

Faster rendering on high-DPI

100+

Languages in AI semantic search

Avalonia Highlights

Pluggable renderer and style system enabled application-specific optimisations
Outperformed WPF in head-to-head benchmarking before the project began
Modern Fluent visuals via Windows Composition rendering
Windows 11 Mica material support shipped one week after the OS release
Featured in Microsoft's Launch 2021 alongside UWP applications
CSS-like styling powers a community theme repository on GitHub
Rich .NET library ecosystem — graphing, HTML rendering, rich text editing

Avalonia has a unique architecture where everything is pluggable — renderer and style system. This enabled application-specific optimisations achieving unmatched performance.

Adir Hudayfi· Creator of Fluent Search

Fluent Search overlay on a Windows desktop, showing process search results alongside a detailed Microsoft Edge browser tab preview — Fluent Search — a Spotlight-style launcher built natively on Windows with Avalonia.

A Spotlight for Windows, Built by One Engineer

Fluent Search is a productivity launcher for Windows — search across applications, windows, files, browser history and bookmarks, on-screen text, in-app content, and tabs from a single keystroke. The brief is simple: take the keyboard-first feel of Spotlight, but make it a first-class Windows citizen, with Fluent visuals, Composition rendering, and the kind of customisation power-users expect.

It is built and maintained as a passion project by Adir Hudayfi, and has shipped 68 releases since launch. Today the application carries a 4.5★ rating on the Microsoft Store.

Why Avalonia, Not WPF

Adir benchmarked Avalonia against WPF before committing to a framework. Avalonia won on raw performance, and the visual story sealed it: Composition rendering and Fluent design support gave the application the modern look users associate with UWP and WinUI, while keeping the flexibility a power-user tool demands. The fit was so clean that on launch, many users assumed the application had been built with UWP.

Microsoft itself featured Fluent Search in its Launch 2021 event — a slot typically reserved for UWP applications. When Windows 11 shipped, Adir added Mica material support within a week of the OS release.

Fluent Search results for the query "fluent search" — surfacing the GitHub repository, recent files, and an installed shortcut, alongside a detailed Microsoft Edge tab preview

Fluent Search results for the query "monitor resolution", with system settings, performance monitor, and related downloaded text files surfaced together

Performance From a Pluggable Foundation

For a launcher that has to feel instant, rendering speed is the product. Avalonia's pluggable renderer and style system gave Adir room to apply application-specific optimisations that would have been hard or impossible on a closed framework. By version 0.9.92, that work had translated into a roughly 3× rendering speed-up on high-DPI displays. The same foundation supported a live theme system with a community-built theme repository on GitHub.

Around it, Adir was able to draw on the wider .NET ecosystem — graphing, HTML rendering, and rich text editing components all worked cleanly with Avalonia, without requiring a parallel toolchain.

After 1.5 years of development, Fluent Search has evolved into the fastest, most customisable desktop search experience available.

Adir Hudayfi· Creator of Fluent Search

And now, AI search

In 2025, Fluent Search added local, on-device AI semantic search — the same Avalonia codebase, extended to support meaning-based queries across files, applications, and settings without a single cloud call. The feature shipped with support for English-only and multi-language models covering more than 100 languages. Four years in, the bet on Avalonia continues to pay off.

The Welcome to AI Search onboarding screen in Fluent Search v1.1, with three pillars — Local & Private, Lightning-Fast, Cross-Language — and a Download AI Components button

Fluent Search is free, and runs natively on Windows.

Try Fluent Search

Avalonia powers production software at some of the world's leading software companies.

From financial trading floors to global manufacturers, teams choose Avalonia for cross-platform .NET reach without compromise.