Robb. Knight.

If you prefer listening to reading, I spoke to John about this on Ruminate 183.

I have used Alfred for about nine years. In that time I've come to rely on it for almost everything I do on my Mac - snippets, clipboard history, finding files, and numerous custom workflows.

Raycast is the new(ish) launcher all the cool kids are using. Off the bat, it has a much nicer UI than Alfred and a lot more options in terms of what it can show in it's window like checkboxes for ticking of reminders. I've clung onto Alfred since Raycast launched but after seeing Laker use it to add a reminder on a stream, I've been wanting to try it out.

Reminders and calendars is something I attempted to make a workflow for in Alfred and it did work, but it didn't work well. I just don't believe Alfred has the right UI options to be able to do it really well. I think Alfred hasn't improved enough in terms of what it can do in recent years and Raycast is the clear choice for anyone new wanting to try a launcher.

The Experiment

I've installed Raycast and set it to open with ⌃ + space which I previously used for Alfred (Alfred is now set to ⌥ + space) and over the next few weeks I'm going to see how much of what I use in Alfred I can get done with Raycast.

So what do I actually do with Alfred? Starting with the built in features that I know Raycast can already do:

• Clipboard manager. Raycast has this. Bonus: it allows filtering by type: text, images, colors, files, and links. This is really nice.
• File search: In my brief testing this works as well as Alfred.
• Snippets: Raycast has it. This script worked perfectly for importing my Alfred ones. It's a shame I can't group them like I can on Alfred.
• Run shortcuts: I currently do this with a workflow in Alfred but Raycast has this built in.
• Bookmark search: Solved with an extension.
• Emoji picker: Again, Raycast has this built in.

My first thoughts after doing this first part is that Raycast feels much nicer: everything is snappier and smoother than Alfred. Things just look better.

The second part of this is workflows, mostly ones I've made. Can I make something like my toggle workflow as easily as I can in Alfred? What about QuickNote? Making workflows for little things I want is a big part of why I use Alfred. I'll be back with part 2 once I've dug into this some more.