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Comment by hotsauceror | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I’m missing part of the picture. Everybody drags on Spotlight, I figured I must be missing something important so I installed Alfred. I press command+space, I type my application name, and boom. There it is. But I mean, I had that before, out of the box. Is this a power user thing? What great things could I be doing, that I’m apparently not, and that for this cat even Alfred isn’t scratching the itch?

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I used (and paid for) Alfred for many years. It was okay, but switched to raycast about 6 months ago and couldn't be happier.

It's really snappy, unlike every other alternative I've tried, and has some good base capabilities, but the extensions store (and how easy they are to write) is the killer feature.

https://www.raycast.com/store

Was there any other reason for switching to Raycast other than it being 'snappy' compared to Alfred?

Asking as a long time Alfred user. I've looked at Raycast, but can't really figure out what it does that Alfred doesn't.

Raycast is free (unless you want cloud sync), and I prefer the UI/UX and menu system it uses. I also felt like many Alfred workflows required fiddling and/or were buggy. In general, Raycast's community ecosystem is a much more pleasant experience than Alfred's workflows (in my opinion).

The UX is just nice, and there's lots of little things to like. Result context menus, quick configuration changes, system control, window management, etc. I can type things into Raycast and can reasonably expect something nice to be suggested, e.g. "pi * 6", "1 month", "1 month from now", "sleep displays", "left half", "schedule", the list goes on.

I'd suggest trying it for a day. If you don't like it, switch back.

So Raycast picks up where Quicksilver left off? Wei wu wei.

So Raycast configurations are hidden and can't be manually synced between machines?

I use Dropbox to sync my Alfred setup (Config, workflows and related files) between 3-4 computers and paying $8/month just for that is a complete no-go.

I use Mackup to sync Raycast settings, so I guess the cloud service is only useful if you want the other paid features.

Config is stored at ~/Library/Preferences/com.raycast.macos.plist

Everything else is at ~/Library/Application Support/com.raycast.macos

I like Alfred but I'm not a huge power user. It does have a bunch of other functionality. Out of the box it lets you do a bunch of stuff like filesystem manipulation, clipboard history management, a simple calculator, and stuff like that.

It's also extensible. For example there's a very useful add-on workflow [0] that makes it really quick to open up the next Zoom meeting you have scheduled in your calendar.

[0] https://github.com/caleb531/open-conference-url

I've got shortcuts for stuff I need

'rpg <autofilled list of games>' opens up roll20 for a specific game + a bunch of PDF rule books related to it

'gg <name of service on my own network>' opens the web page for that service or a directory on my NAS

I can look up and copy any emoji by typing 'emoji <part of the name>' and press enter to copy it to my clipboard

Bunch of small things that take 10-15 minutes to set up and then just work forever without any intervention

A few things I use:

1) File system browser: I just type "/" and can start navigating anywhere

2) Google search without opening a browser first

2) Workflow to toggle dark and light mode just by typing "dark".

3) On Ventura, I use Alfred to search System Settings, because the System Settings app itself is trash.

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