We've All Felt It | Hacker News Reader

We've All Felt It

raycast.com

16 pointsfmerian20 comments

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”.

I also loved Quicksilver. Your comment inspired me to reinstall it.

Turns out, it still works great. I've been using Raycast for about a year now and haven't really loved it. So I guess I'm switching back!

Link for the curious: https://qsapp.com/index.php

Oh, amazing it works. I stopped using it during a period where it wouldn’t run on newer macOS — again probably like 10-ish years ago. Sounds like someone breathed new life into it.

There’s not a ton of activity but it’s definitely maintained on GitHub these days: https://github.com/quicksilver/Quicksilver/commits/main/

Quicksilver was dope. I replaced it with LaunchBar. I really enjoy not take my hands off the keyboard.

The windup for the pitch should have everybody nodding along.

The pitch is yikes.

Can you say more? I didn't find the pitch particularly compelling but also didn't see it as "yikes". Seemed like a regular productivity tool pitch what am I missing?

I'm guessing maybe he's taking a particularly dark reading of

> The choice is yours: continue clicking through life or take the short way.

Trying to build a frontend for all other services elicits an immediate grimace on a few levels.

All-in-one, swiss-army-knife solutions are never superior to dedicated tools; hence Unix philosophy, hence microservices, a lot of engineering thought reflects this. Introducing possibly-leaky abstractions onto everything you do gives shivers.

For another, introducing LLMs into every layer of your workflow is not a productivity panacea. It's a dangerous distraction at this point in my opinion.

The security implications of a single tool that you grant this much access give another moment to cringe.

It could be incredibly nifty, even useful, and my gut reaction would still be "hnnngh noooo." Near the end of the current version of the copy it claims Raycast to be "inspired by early command line interfaces;" I just prefer the command line interface, thanks.

Agree. Still not sure how this can help me.

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.

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?"

For productivity apps, this may be a non-issue as they're not (at least for now...I'm watching you Microsoft) pushing ads into things like VSCode or Slack.

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.

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

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

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

Agree. I'm going to need a bit more information before I take the time to download this. Where is the compelling argument. Awful splash page to explain what this is.

Sure, I've felt it. The sales pitch here is part of what I'm feeling.

Wish products would stop making me read through help files to try and figure out what the product is.

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.

Yeah, it’s the same genre. There’s a bunch of these - Quicksliver, LaunchBar, even Spotlight. I’ve always been a little put off by Alfred’s design.

Friendly note: losing, not loosing :)

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.

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