I also found the file search poor on Raycast, but it seems to have improved (a lot) recently.
I don’t know whether I just had a misconfigured setting, or there was a bug in their implementation, or they’ve just iterated on their search feature, but it is much better than before. I’d say it’s now as good as Alfred’s.
I’ve been going back-and-forth between Raycast and Alfred 5.
It might sound trivial, but, for my use, the single biggest differentiator in Raycast’s favour is how it displays a thumbnail grid of recent screenshots and automatically applies an OCR layer so that they’re searchable.
Afaik, there is no way to replicate this in Alfred.
I use a lot of screenshots in my workflows, and it is so convenient to have the thumbnail grid.
As a paying Alfred user since V1 (11 years ago! 
), I feel a bit guilty about using Raycast. But for my usecases, Raycast’s recent product development has been far more incrementally useful than the improvements in Alfred 5.
I use Raycast for commands and Spotlight for everything else, because I like how Spotlight shows results under all categories, while Raycast needs an additional action to search files or other categories.
Not the biggest fan of VC funded companies either, but for now, Raycast is solid.
Looks like Nomics is used in the calculator function for currency operations, as mentioned here:
It’s possible the request to Google is for the favicon, as Google is a default quicklink option IIRC.
I’m glad others faced the same issue and not just me.
Thanks for sharing.
I don’t trust that lol. When we send our info to that crypto website, doesn’t matter for what reason, they still have that info right? I just use spotlight for that, which doesn’t use a crypto website to calculate currencies. Last time I checked they used Yahoo which has much better data compliance that a no-name crypto website. But others might be fine with this so meh 
Yeah this might not be in Alfred right now. I just use the folder filter and 99% of the time, need the latest screenshot so can easily pickup the first result entry. It can also be viewed using Shift. But not as clean as a thumbnail view for sure.
This is the type of data being sent by Raycast to Nomics to do those conversions. Pretty minimal.
ids=BTC,ETH,XRP
interval=1d,30d
convert=EUR
platform-currency=ETH
per-page=100&page=1"`Cool. How about the full request, were you able to track that? Usually a server can track the IP, type of machine and bunch of other details. This is pretty standard for a REST call btw, so nothing specific to Raycast.
I’m more curious about why the app was trying to connecting to that domain for no reason, when I didn’t even look up crypto.
Anyway, I think I’m beating the drum here, if users are curious or cautious enough, they’d try to drill down and investigation Raycast’s network calls 
No, I just looked at Nomic’s API docs. I understand being upset that network calls are being made.
Oh no. I am not upset TBH. I would expect something like this from a free app. How would they make money? Like I said earlier if you don't pay for the product, you are the product. I am actually happy that Little Snitch helped protect me from this shitty tracking/unnecessary analytics, so it was worth buying it. 
Honestly, since buying Little Snitch, I am surprised seeing the amount of tracking mac apps do. I thought that was what websites did, but no. So many unnecessary network calls that are not essential for the app’s functionality. These things drain a lot of battery but since they are in the background, we don’t notice them and curse our browsers, haha.
Thanks for the tip about Universal Actions! I didn’t know Alfred could do this. Can I ask what key/key combo you use for the Universal Actions global hotkey?
for file search, there are two ways to search for files:
Yes, it is different and requires time to adjust your muscle memory, but it works every bit as good as Alfred for file searching.
I have found zero slowness in this app.
You can also allocate a dedicated global keyboard shortcut to the Raycast filesearch, which cuts out a step / keystroke
That’s not the case. You can do go to the beginning of the line using cmd+back arrow and type '.
Second option includes using a Keyword in addition to the default options.
Third, I think you could do fallback options, but I don’t do this as the ' or space key works great. I read somewhere in the Alfred forum someone had done this.
Four, you could also set Alfred to show files on the default results, but it could crowd your results, but hey, its an option if you have fewer bookmarks and other things
This is a primary reason I use Alfred. Options. 
I appreciate that Raycast developers are making an opinionated app, but in cases like this I like having the ability to pick and choose how the app works best for me.
Late to the party but have been trialling Raycast.
Two features currently stand out - first, it can manage my windows and I’ve been able to set a Global shortcut to centre a window and make it two thirds of the screen, which as I’m using an ultra wide is dead handy. Saves running another program to do that (or spend the time to set up in BetterTouchTool or Keyboard Maestro).
The second and this might be the reason I stick with it - it is able to understand commas and £ symbols when using the calculator function and therefore it’s of far more use to me than the Alfred one - as when I use this, I can copy from my Number spreadsheet, then have to remove the comma and the £ sign before it’ll do a calculation. Raycast just gets on with it and gives me the answer (and then adds to clipboard if I want) to allow me to do quick calculations to figures.
Agree with you on this part. I run both Alfred and Raycast because I’d like to be vaguely familiar with the new hotness in case it ever takes over in popularity - but I have plenty of workflows in Alfred. I’d have probably stopped with Raycast if it wasn’t for the much more frictionless maths entry. That alone is worth keeping it running for me.
I’ve found that Alfred supports the comma in the thousands separator, so I’m back to Alfred now. I find it handles my day to day workflow better and the maths was the only thing keeping me on Recast.
The setting I had to change is shown below. It by default ignore the £ sign ($ and other currency symbols as well). Turns out I should have read the manual!
This is wonderful (and slightly baffling that it’s not standard). Thank you!
