A love letter to Raycast
22 points by rmoff
22 points by rmoff
Raycast is fine if you disable all the AI stuff.
These are the things I mostly use (which is really a fraction of what Raycast would like you to use):
+1 to Maccy, it’s the best clipboard manager I’ve used. Usually when something is natively supported, I delete the 3rd party thing, but in this case (Spotlight now has clipboard management support) I am still using Maccy and plan to do so for the foreseeable future.
Sorry for the tangent!
Once you seriously use any part of Raycast, you'll probably pretty quickly go for a native version of the same app.
I love Alfred. I tried Raycast few times and it is indeed nice but I don't want a subscription service for my launcher. I have no problem paying Alfred's power pack license fee, knowing that nobody will force me to upgrade next month.
I also wasn't thrilled that Raycast allowed 3rd party binaries in their plugin repository. I'm not sure what is the situation today. Hopefully, they no longer allow that.
With that said, the Raycast plugins are so much better and easier to author given they are just JavaScript and HTML instead of the custom workflow system Alfred has in place.
I used Alfred for a long time because Spotlight was slow. Now that Spotlight isn’t slow anymore, I use Spotlight.
Simple reason, every time I try one of those fancy launchers, I notice the same thing: I don’t use their features. At all. After a few minutes of tinkering, I go back to just using my Mac, and I completely forget the launcher can do more than launch apps, simple calculations and web search.
I completely forget the launcher can do more than launch apps, simple calculations and web search.
Every time I [cmd-space] <calculation> [enter] on the work laptop and Spotlight opens Calculator to show me the same damned calculation I've just performed, I make a mental note to ask IT for an Alfred license because it is INFURIATING compared to Alfred's sensible "copy the result to the clipboard".
Even if that was the only thing I used Alfred for, it would be worth every penny.
[cmd-space] <calculation> [cmd-c] copies the result of the calculation to the clipboard in Spotlight.
Granted you then have to press esc twice to dismiss Spotlight...
The problem for me is that Spotlight do not allow extensions. This is important for me as for example Spotlight for long time didn't fully support currency conversion for my dominant currency, and I use it quite often. If Spotlight would provide extensions API, then I would probably never think about using Raycast.
My tool of choice in this category is LaunchBar, 20+ years and counting now. Also worth a peek.
I used Launchbar for a long time, then spotlight got fast and it was "good enough" so I stopped buying Launchbar.
I find one unique feature that I use a lot is navigating to a deep file in LaunchBar, then passing it to an app of choice to open it. For example, opening a Swift file quickly in VS Code instead of the default Xcode.
Interesting. I've never had any success with finding files with any global search type thing. None of them ever work the way I expect, so I just never use them. Project level searches I use all the time, those are amazing. I've never spent time trying to understand why my worldview and the global file search worldviews are so incompatible. Especially since the project level ones work so well for me.
I could see your open as shortcut being useful though.
Funny, as another Alfred->Raycast user, the one thing I truly miss from Alfred is the emphasis on processing the whole line as pure text.
Raycast tries to switch to input "fields" once it's identified the subcommand, which is sometimes wrong, and kind of unfriendly to undo. Even worse is when a subcommand/plugin tries to go wizard-style and present me with a sequence of screens/questions, which is too slow. I want to do everything purely by typing.
The thing that got me to switch is how much better Raycast's plugin ecosystem is. The Alfred plugin setup was just way more finicky.
I'm not an advanced user of Raycast but I like that it lets you easily define an "hyperkey" and associated shortcuts, and tie them to commands. Very convenient (even more convenient than segular search) for quickly switching between apps.
I have tried Raycast multiple times, but ended back with Alfred each time. Although I still use Alfred daily, I think I use LeaderKey a lot more. It's quick and works really great for my workflow. I'm used to the "leader key" workflow from Vim/Helix, especially from Helix where I get the preview of the available commands.