Raycast vs. Alfred or Launchbar?

Software
24

I can’t tell if I think what we have right now in Alfred, where scripts can be in any language. Some of which bundle the language compiler itself is more or less user friendly than docker.

If anything I think compiling to webassembly would come before docker

25

I think Docker should be included in the operating system, and all apps should run in Docker containers, so it probably won’t come as a shock that I prefer it.
But even if you have to install Docker to use it, it’s not that hard to install and use, so I think it’s a perfectly reasonable dependency.

Further, having a standardized pattern where apps can depend on Docker would be far preferable to having to ship runtimes in the app, or even allowing(?) extensions to ship their runtimes.

I’m on the edge of a tangent here, so just let me say this: #!/usr/bin/env docker ;p

Meanwhile, I’m currently spending my workdays fighting through Kubernetes RBAC hell, looking for a safe and maintainable pattern across an organization of over 100 devs, so that goes to show that what starts simple and pure doesn’t always scale up well.

26

make profit in volume

27

after trying out for a week or so, I started to like Raycast, especially after installing some extensions such as Obsidian, Things. The native language calculator is quite nice too

1 Like
28

(Reposting from the March Software Club thread and deleting that post):

Adding on to my past self:

  • centralized extension store is available for a curated collection of well-built integrations with almost anything you could think of (missing something? message me and I’ll see if I can build one)
  • dev team is planning to build native versions for Windows and Linux as well as the current native macOS version
  • from what I’ve heard in the Slack they’re planning to charge teams/enterprise and not individuals
  • dev team is iterating fast, almost all feature requests in the Slack from people saying “X is in Alfred, I want it in Raycast” are answered with “coming next week”, “shipped for next release”, or “working on it!”
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29

Raycast continues to impress me.
I really can’t see going back to Alfred. True be told, I didn’t use the workflows much, just for some Zotero automations.

I’m gradually learning more of Raycast’s capabilities, and adding those in. Nothing earth shattering or worth noting here, but just a good experience.

30

Raycast is quickly gaining traction. There are some things it does better than Alfred / LaunchBar, but some that are still lacking.

  • Snippets/Quick Links are cumbersome to create in Raycast.
  • There’s no Instant Send feature.
  • You can’t push indexing results into the main search results. For instance, in LaunchBar, I can tell an index to expose it’s results at the base level, so I can search for it without initializing a command first. This is a lot faster for some types of data.

I imagine the internal team will re-vamp Snippets at some point, and an extension developer has a plugin in review that should accomplish something close to what “Instant Send” is in LaunchBar. The 3rd item is something they seem to be against but I will probably get over that once snippets and the ability to push things into Raycast is complete.

Overall Raycast just feels fresher, and many of the API-based commands (workflows) seem faster to fetch data than running them in Alfred / LaunchBar.

1 Like
31

OK, 10 minutes of tinkering is not enough time to have an opinion. But, updating to Mac OS 12.3 well and truly killed Python 2 (which is long overdue), but that also broke a bunch of Alfred workflows. I was mourning the loss of the Alfred/Zotero workflow, so the fact that a Raycast/Zotero (what the hell do we call these?) thing exists is deeply gratifying.

I remain poised between skepticism and hope. Haven’t figured out how to run searches of various web services from Raycast yet, but surely that’s a thing.

32

I do not understand why Alfred is dragging its feet fixing the hardcoded python and php paths with Raycast out there. Users shouldn’t have to monkey around to fix this stuff. Either autodetect the new path or prompt the user to paste the new ones in.

3 Likes
33

These may be what you’re looking for:

Relevant Raycast help page

3 Likes
34

Tempting. Very tempting.

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35

Wow, now I have to try it.
This is currently the most annoying thing on windows for me, that there is no Alfred and I feel I can’t communicate with the computer.

36

This app isn’t as extensible as these macOS options, but I found this app to work pretty well as a general stop gap when using Windows.

EDIT: Actually looks they have a “Workflows” feature called “Tasks” that came out in Feb. Fluent Search version 0.9.90.0 & Fluent Search

37

Thank you! Made a note to try it.

Currently I use PowerTools - Run.
It is enough to start IntelliJ and I try my best to do nothing else on that machine.
But when the homeoffice season is over (if ever) I will have to deal with multiple applications, so I might be worth to be prepared.

Cross platform would mean that I can fiddle with the configuration on my Mac, and then have it all just appear on windows.

I haven’t yet tried https://cerebroapp.com.

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38

Have you tried Active Words? I used that heavily back in my windows days.

39

Instant send is vital to me an keeping me locked in Launchbar despite it lacking many other things I want.

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40

Instant Send in Launchbar is so well done, what other things do you want?

41

I missed having the Instant Send feature when I switched from LaunchBar to Alfred. Fortunately, Alfred has since introduced Universal Actions, which fills this gap nicely.