I feel like Launchbar, which I believe predates Quicksilver, is pretty great. It’s true Quicksilver really perfected that motif of doing custom search operators and file manipulation, but Launchbar is really great.
I should probably give Launchbar another shot at some point; recommendation appreciated. My expectation is merely that it’d be nicer than Alfred, but that’s enough.
It’s fair that the core app still compiles and has some maintenance, but there hasn’t been work done on the plugins and system integration in about a decade. What’s left makes a nice but slowly decaying launcher. The magical workflows of being able to navigate swiftly between app context menus, system services, and web services without a mouse or even leaving QS...those are but memories.
QS circa 2008ish spoiled me for all launchers since.
Just curious..what is it you find lacking about Alfred? I swapped a few years ago when QS was having some wobbles with releases keeping up with Mac OS releases. I forget what the exact issues were at the time. It took about 3 months to find and replace my QS workflow but now I love it.
It turns out that this is now hard to answer! I tried finding the original articles and screencasts I’d used to get started, and they’re all on dead domains and Google Video. The tl;dr version is Proxy Objects And Their Implications. QS was (and remains) a serviceable launcher, but it shone most as a way to construct functional sentences, similar to UNIX pipes but for the MacOS GUI. Being able to do trigger->Current App Menu Contents->(type name of menu item) was already rad. “Select all these files, compress them into a single archive, then attach them to an email with the following subject” from your launcher was doable and even straightforward. “Capture text/current clipboard and apply a preset template for this keybinding and append to my Capture file” was essentially the first pass for how people did GTD capture on Mac.
Granted, a lot of the is now doable with specialized apps, but to no longer have so flexible and versatile a tool makes me sad.
I can’t build demos at the moment, as my Mac has been in the shop with Apple for almost a month now with precious little communication—but that’s another rant entirely.
Yes that's correct, sorry for the misspelling on original comment, can't edit now.
It's a pretty young company / product but I see great awesome first party integrations instead of unreliable hacky 3rd party scripts which was the default on alfred/packal median of plugins tbh. (As much as I loved 'em and toying with them)
Raycast integrations with for example another awesome tool (Linear.app for PM) Github Issues or Jira if you or your company feel the necessity to put yourself thorugh such painfully useless endeavour lol)
PS: When looking for alfred scripts the other day for a co-worker which did a clean install after recommending it to swap spotlight, packal returned pretty ugly errors when running any search keyword on the site, doesn't seem that well maintained either... so