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Comment by IceDane | Hacker News Reader

I want something like this, which is why I more or less have the skeleton and something that at least approaches this idea, built organically through time using various utilities. Rofi, some shell scripts, etc.

This is a great idea in theory but much harder to do properly in practice. The idea is only really worthwhile as long as you can really extend it to a lot of things(no one cares about adding an Nth tool that can do GitHub and jira and one more thing).. and that's where this is going to go wrong.

There are reasons the interfaces to many tools that we use are as complicated as they are - it's needed to use the tool to its full effect. In order to achieve the same effect in this tool, you are doomed to constantly reimplement literally the entire interfaces of all the interesting services, just as CLI interfaces.. and that's just not gonna scale.

I'm not into all this YC stuff, but does the YC20 in the title means that someone has funded this idea?

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> does the YC20 in the title means that someone has funded this idea

Not only that, but the Launch HN title means that it's a promoted post [1]. Launch HNs are one of three formal things [2] that HN gives back to YC in exchange for funding it.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[2] The others are job ads for YC startups and displaying YC founder names in orange to other YC founders.

> I want something like this

It's existed for almost 40 years, and it's called emacs. If anyone questions emacs's ability to display incredibly useful UIs, try using magit[0]. Emacs sucks though, so I hope this comes out better!

[0] https://magit.vc/

Also the Raskins', Jef and his son Aza, were onto this a long time ago. The general idea is applications, desktop or web, are the problem and that a better interface is one that provides a ubiquitous means of issuing commands with natural language.

About 10 years ago or so Aza created Enso which ran on the desktop and then Ubiquity which ran in the browser. These were both steps in this direction. I looked at going further with the idea but quickly ran into the question of how best to implement with currently available desktop technologies. But a lot of folks have been nibbling at the edges of this problem for a long time and they end up using rofi or dmenu or emacs and a bunch of custom scripts.

In my opinion one really needs to design a brand new shell from the ground up. But when I say shell I mean OS, not terminal.

I totally agree with you that scalability is an huge point and that we need to tackle it. Two things:

1. We won't build all the integrations ourselves. There are just too many individual things. We'll provide an API that developers can use to cover their custom workflows. 2. Raycast doesn't replace your other tools. It makes the common interactions with them simple and fast. We believe that it shouldn't take plenty of clicks to create issues in Jira or update any statuses and that there is an huge opportunity to streamline this tasks. Think about it as a companion app for your web apps.

And to your last point: Yes, we got funded by YC.

Alright -- I wish you the best of luck, though I'm skeptical that you guys can sell this to businesses. Mostly because as I've gained experience working in the industry, it hasn't been my experience that corporations are willing to pay for something that can only give nebulous promises about increasing employee productivity. Doubly so if it's some kind of developer(or power user)-oriented tool whose benefit might be hard to explain to the average joe.

But I hope I'm wrong, since I would really love this. I use rofi + some custom shell scripts to achieve a similar interface in some ways, but as I imagine you know very well by now, going from something like that, to something that integrates with jira(or whatever) is not just a couple of steps.

Counterpoint: my fairly large employer pays site licenses for Omnifocus, 1Password, and other productivity apps.

> I'm not into all this YC stuff, but does the YC20 in the title means that someone has funded this idea?

Yes, Y Combinator (ycombinator.com) is a top startup accelerator (and the owner of the site you are currently on).

They fund batches of 150+ startups twice a year. W20 means they were in the first batch of this year.

> does the YC20 in the title means that someone has funded this idea?

It just means they are part of the Winter 2020 batch (the most recent one).

You are right about the interface getting really complicated if every feature is to be implemented. But, assuming the 80/20 rule is in effect - Most of the time we would only be using a few features. As long as they identify those features and only implement them well, this tool will have great value.

Anyone who has to use Jira on a daily basis will definitely want to try this out!

I couldn't say it better :-)

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