Show HN: Zazu App – An OSS app launcher, similar to Alfred | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Zazu App – An OSS app launcher, similar to Alfred

zazuapp.org

111 pointsblainesch56 comments

I love that this is cross platform.

When I tried to install the debian package through the Ubuntu Software Center I received this warning:

    The package is of bad quality
    The installation of a package which violates the quality standards isn't allowed. This could cause serious problems on your computer. Please contact the person or organisation who provided this package file and include the details beneath.
    Lintian check results for /home/<user>/Downloads/zazu-v0.2.1-linux-x64.deb:
    E: zazu: maintainer-address-missing Blaine Schmeisser

I just installed on a fresh install of Ubuntu, but maybe this is debian specific. It looks like I just need to add my email address to the author field, I'll try and release again today with that fix and one other! :D

I second the sentiments on cross platform! I use MacOS + Linux at work and Windows + Linux at home, so quality cross-platform software is great for consistency.

Oh yikes! I'll try and get this resolved.

I added the maintainer email address for the v0.2.2 deploy, can you confirm this is working for you now?

I was able to install without warning now. However, the alt+space command doesn't seem to work. That instead opens the context menu in the app that has focus. I can use Zazu by clicking the menu bar icon and choosing 'Toggle Zazu' though.

I'm running Ubuntu 14.04 in case that's helpful.

So Zazu is based on Alfred which was based on Quicksilver[1]. As someone who never left Quicksilver in the first place, what are some of the improvements that either alternative brings to the table?

1. https://qsapp.com/

I haven't installed Quick Silver in many years, so my understanding may be dated, but at the time it didn't offer many intuitive actions, such as copying the calculator result to your clipboard.

Alfred doesn't treat plugins as first class citizens, only alfred can have the top level search space, all plugins have prefixes. Plugins in Zazu are first class citizens, there is no built in behavior so you have more flexibility with what you want.

Zazu is also cross platform, so switching between Mac and Ubuntu for instance wouldn't hurt your workflow. Alfred and QuickSilver are Mac specific.

I tried switching from QS to Alfred ages ago, since Quicksilver development has been stagnant for over 5 years (it's still being updated, but just barely — mostly just compatibility-related improvements).

So obviously you can deduce from my last sentence that the biggest advantage Alfred offers is that it's actually under active development. New features are added pretty regularly. Just last month they added some new stuff. Nothing game-changing IMO, but it's a massive difference from Quicksilver. (New features occasionally appear in the QS change log, but they're almost universally trivial — for example, in the latest release they made it prompt you for what to do when there's a file-rename conflict. That's the level of 'feature addition' you can expect from QS.)

As a result of this active development, Alfred has a vibrant community. Their developers are easy to reach via social media and e-mail, they have a forum, a blog, tech support people, &c. They have lots of users who like to share their work-flows and settings. Quicksilver's community was once like that, but it hasn't been for many years. I don't think most people even realise it's still around. The Web-site design/structure hasn't been updated since ~2010, giving the impression that the project is abandoned. Much of its extended functionality is buried in esoteric third-party plug-ins, and documentation is often out-of-date or simply non-existent.

Alfred is much prettier by default, its configuration interface is so much more elegant and intuitive, and it's a lot more dynamic in the sense that the UI can be moulded to better suit certain features (for example, the music-player feature adds media control buttons to the interface). The Quicksilver interface is pretty much static no matter what you're doing, and it's honestly not suited for a lot of the functionality people have tried to inject into it (like clipboard management).

Alfred is also vastly more stable and reliable. Hard lock-ups and silent crashes are an almost weekly occurrence for me on Quicksilver, and the auto-updater seems to break periodically, so that every 3 to 6 months i have to go manually download the latest version from the Web site.

With all of that said, i'm still using Quicksilver, and the #1 reason for that is the fact that it handles its own catalogue index. Quicksilver has very powerful custom file-indexing options, so that for example you can control exactly what types of files it catalogues under what directories, how many levels deep it goes, &c. Alfred, meanwhile, uses Spotlight, and only provides global (as opposed to per-directory) toggles for a few basic file types like 'folders' and 'images'. As a result, finding things in git repository directories and similar complex file structures can be very tedious.

The other main advantage QS has over Alfred is that it's free and open-source, which is important to some people... but it's not to me. If it weren't for my very particular file-indexing needs, i would definitely switch to Alfred.

I'm the author of Zazu, I'm happy to answer any questions. Ask away!

On Win 10 FHD the UI is tiny - looks like a scaling issue. Also uninstall is broken.

I bought the original Alfred v1 Powerpack.

But, they recently made that unavailable for download and want me to buy v3... Which I don't need.

So I've been awaiting an alternative.

So thanks for this ! I'm excited to try it out.

You can still try to download v2 here, based on wildcard naming convention.

https://cachefly.alfredapp.com/Alfred_2.8.7_442.dmg

P.S.: not sure about license compatibility of v1 -> v2.

Awesome to hear! I hope this works well for you! [:

Alfred piggybacks on spotlight's metadata index for finding a file, how does the file finder for this work?

This looks great. I've been debating on building my own tool for this. I'll try and contribute some code to this.

Yes, since the first file finder needed to be cross platform I create a cache in the plugin, but a mac specific one would be great! :D

Technically it spins up another process and recursively goes through a whitelisted set of directories. It caches just the app locations, not all the files.

Hmmm alright interesting. I'll look at this when I get off work. Thank you for the reply.

The homepage says

  brew cask install zazu

should work to install via Homebrew, but it doesn't.

    $ brew update && brew cask install zazu

Works for me...

    $ brew --version
    Homebrew 1.1.6
    Homebrew/homebrew-core (git revision e517; last commit 2017-01-05)

How does this compare to GNOME Do?

How does the file search on Win10 compare to native file search?

It was implemented in Node and I've not benchmarked it on Windows, but it's probably not as fast. [:

How do you search files in a cross platform way?

I've recently been enjoying using Hain, another spotlight-esque launcher like this one with more features:

- A built-in package manager based on NPM

- A visual settings editor - there's no need to edit configuration files

- Very fast fuzzy matching of file and program names

- Toast notifications and buttons

- An HTML-based preview pane

Sadly it's Windows-only for now, but there are contributors working on porting it to Linux and macOS.

If you're running macOS I've had success with building the feature/macos branch.

https://github.com/appetizermonster/hain

Hain is a great project, they launched a few months after I started working on Zazu!

For comparison:

- Zazu has a github based package manager

- A dotfile for configuration (for backup!)

- Very fast fuzzy matching of file and program names

- Cross platform notifications (toast on windows!)

- An HTML-based preview pane

- Cross platform!

Seems really similar to Lacona ( https://www.lacona.io/ ), which also has add-ons and it's built on React.

Any idea if it's based on it?

I haven't heard of lacona until you just mentioned it, but it does look nice. They also have plugins written in node, but offer a more "natural language" search, which Zazu doesn't. Zazu is also completely open source, but they have a paid version. Zazu is all cross platform, but Lacona only offers mac builds.

I'm a big power user of Alfred. I've created a lot of custom workflows in Alfred to automate things in macOS, such as setting up dev environments (window management) or using the Dash workflow integration. The power of Alfred is in its workflows and workflow creator. Alfred + Hammerspoon is particularly nice. (You can execute hotkeys in Alfred that trigger Hammerspoon init.lua bindings)

I can't tell if Zazu is just a replacement for simple app launching, or if it has the ability to do everything Alfred's workflows can do.

Zazu does allow for keyboard shortcuts, and can do everything the Alfred workflows can, but does not currently provide a GUI for creating the workflows. The biggest difference for the plugins, is that they are written in Node so they can be cross platform.

For more info on creating plugins: http://zazuapp.org/documentation/plugins/

Thanks. The workflow creator GUI is the big seller for Alfred, it saves a lot of time in testing and tweaking workflows and from having to write a bunch of boilerplate.

Completely agree, and I can't wait to have one for Zazu! :D

I'm a big user of Alfred, and I installed Hammerspoon a while back, but I have yet to actually do a single thing with Hammerspoon. I'm curious if you can provide any examples of what you use Hammerspoon for.

I use it to setup dev environments' windows. For example, a hotkey that launches the following configuration automatically in about 14 seconds (this is my primary coding setup).

1. 3 terminals and 1 Finder each in a quadrant on Space 1

2. Two Chrome windows, full-screened and placed into split-view next to each other (split view is when you hold down the minimize button for a bit to put two full-screen apps next to each other)

3. Sublime Text 3, full-screened.

4. Dash (doc app) full-screened and placed split-view with another full-screened Chrome window.

Basically automates the windows I would setup manually every time I reboot and want to code.

Over in Windows land, I used AutoHotkey for years for all sorts of things, so Hammerspoon is comfortable for me.

Is there any information on how you can run hammer spoon lua bindings from Alfred? I always wanted to call specific functions from hammer spoon from applescript or something but have no idea how you could do that.

In the workflow creator, under "Outputs" is "Dispatch Key Combo Output". Give it the same hotkeys as the binding uses in init.lua. https://www.alfredapp.com/help/workflows/outputs/dispatch-ke...

Edit - If you're looking to do it through AppleScript, see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3690167/how-can-one-invok...

I have installed the latest version 0.3.2 for Ubuntu 16.04 via the Software Center, and also via Gdebi (which reported that it was already installed, but reinstalled) and I am unable to find the installation anywhere. No config files in my home directory. A search in Nautilus only finds the .deb. What am I missing? I am running Budgie desktop, if that makes a difference.

Note that on win10, you have to manually unblock the installer to allow it to run at all -- otherwise double-clicking just hangs explorer.exe.

Can you talk about the impact of this app on battery life / performance? Slack has made me leery of everything electron.

I've been running it on my Mac, along with other electron apps like Slack and VSCode, and I've not noticed a drain on my battery.

It's never come up in my "Apps using significant energy" in the battery dropdown.

Slack also does a whole lot more while idling compared to most Electron apps.

We're writing a flight planner in Electron and currently have less of an "energy impact" compared to its Qt counterparts.

+1 for clipboard history easily searchable. I think in my workflow it's adding so much to my personal productivy. Maybe the best productivy hack in Alfred.

This is really great! I'll have to try it out sometime.

I've been wanting a "replacement" for Alfred for years. Not because i dislike Alfred, i love it; But because it's a tool locking me to OSX.

These days i want me tools to be cross platform and a good core UX, even if that means i have to drop features. It's why i like CLI tools so much.

Tested using Linux mint: calculator, google and other things didn't work, the only thing that was working was application launcher

Uh oh! Can you file an issue on github with the log file stored in `~/.zazu/log`?

got it running on osx, first it didn't worked (nothing suggested), then i've restarted it and it seems to work.

pretty basic, but it more or less match my needs. the only thing that i miss is the file icons or app icons: it show you multiple match but the icons are all the same, dark, so you can't quickly disambiguate them

In v0.2.2 it tells you when it's still loading the plugins. Feel free to try deleting your ~/.zazu folder and using this newer version!

It takes minute to download and install all the default plugins. So it takes a few minutes after the first launch to start working.

I love this thing so far. I recently switched to using Mint instead of OSX because I refuse to pay $2300 for a 15" MBP. I was really missing the clipboard ability of Alfred, and this is REALLY helpful.

Would it be possible to auto paste the clipboard result when you select it?

I would LOVE auto paste, but I've not found a good way to do this in Electron yet. ]:

If you know how, let me know :D

I've not used electron but can't you simply invoke Applescript or use a shell command? Checkout pbcopy + pbpaste utilities or use applescript:

    $ osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to keystroke "v" using command down'

I realize this isn't cross platform but there should be similar methods in other OS'es.

Building it on Arch Linux failed because npm run release expects dpkg-deb to be available.

I can confirm the same on Fedora Linux. More specifically, the command exits on `fakeroot`.

Seems interesting. Installed on Ubuntu 16.04 and keeps asking to update to 0.2.2 and hotkeys don't seem to work. Also crashed during a file search.

The v0.2.2 I pushed the tag for, but didn't update the website. Sorry about that.

Can you report the crash in the repo and attach the ~/.zazu/log file?

Disregard. A reboot has it showing up now.

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