from Hacker News

We've All Felt It

by fmerian on 5/16/24, 4:18 PM with 20 comments

• by jitl on 5/16/24, 6:19 PM

  I installed Raycast recently and kind of like it, but haven’t really dug deep.

  About 10-15 years ago, I was a religious user of an earlier take on this keyboard driven fuzzy search launcher/action thing: Quicksilver (https://qsapp.com/). The main difference between Quicksilver and other command-based programs like your traditional Unix shell is that Quicksilver is <object> <verb> instead of <verb> <object>. So you’d search for a file, hit tab, then fuzzy search for an action like “send to”, tab, search for contact and press enter to send.

  It’s like a super-slick way of building a pipeline of actions that’s type aware.

  I haven’t gone far enough with Raycast to understand if it works the same way, so far I’m just using it as a Spotlight replacement, where it feels just as fast / faster and slightly less annoying about suggesting “1 pascal” instead of 1Password.app when I type “1pa”.

• by gryfft on 5/16/24, 4:26 PM

  The windup for the pitch should have everybody nodding along.

  The pitch is yikes.

• by j3g on 5/16/24, 6:42 PM

  It is a cute set of 4 utilities (clipboard history, emoji, window sizing, AI question/answer) encapsulated together. Looks pretty. I'm a user of LaunchBar and not seeing any benefit to nudge me to switch.

• by jrm4 on 5/16/24, 6:21 PM

  I very much hope I'm wrong, but this feels like it will be dead in the water in roughly the same way Google Reader was; there's too much at stake by outside parties to "let" this sort of thing happen in the form of "another app?"

• by bjtitus on 5/16/24, 7:24 PM

  I'm a big Raycast user and thought this was a new announcement. I wish they would build something like what they describe, but it's still an app launcher with a bunch of independently operating plugins.

• by RankingMember on 5/16/24, 6:20 PM

  OP: Just fyi, need a correction of "loosing" to "losing" in the writeup:

  > Or look up an answer, without loosing yourself in the internet?

• by poopsmithe on 5/16/24, 6:30 PM

  This article title is terrible. "We've All Felt It" tells me nothing about the product.

• by csande17 on 5/16/24, 6:30 PM

  Is it just me, or is this app extremely similar to Alfred (https://www.alfredapp.com/)? I guess if you like the AI subscription business model better than a one-time "pro" purchase, Raycast might be the app for you.

• by peterarmstrong on 5/16/24, 6:32 PM

  Friendly note: losing, not loosing :)

• by 7e on 5/17/24, 4:55 AM

  Another moronic business idea only YC’s meat grinder would fund. It’s OK to be young and naive, but it’s not OK to exploit the naive as your business model, YC. Shame on you.