I'm currently trying both Raycast windows (beta) and Flow Launcher. I've never really used this kind of launcher before (just the highly frustrating Windows main search feature).
- Raycast has a nice UI that can expand to work well with extensions
- Flow is faster to use. With Raycast you often need to enter an extension to finish your action. To launch a scrip on Flow I just type "r [shortcut] -> enter" while Raycast is "quicklinks -> enter -> [shortcut] -> enter. [edit, with minimal setup using aliases, you can have similar speed. See __jonas comment below]
- Performance-wise, Raycast was often eating my RAM, but a dev mentioned it's expected in the beta, they'll fix it for the launch. Otherwise, both feel snappy
- Both seem to have enough community support and extensions
- I never really tried the AI features, I don't know if it's the right place for me to augment my workflow w/ it
Curious about the experience of others with these tools or similar ones
> Flow is faster to use. With Raycast you often need to enter an extension to finish your action. To launch a scrip on Flow I just type "r [shortcut] -> enter" while Raycast is "quicklinks -> enter -> [shortcut] -> enter
That’s surprising to me, since it’s not how it works in the mac version of Raycast.
There you just type the extension name to trigger it, which you can also set an alias for, so I have it set so that if I type “c” then press space I see my list of vscode projects which I can search. “f” goes into file search (I think that’s the default even)
Nope, sorry. My main use case is app launch, finding settings, and some scripts. I don't use file search that much.
Small point for Flow here again, because you just have to use the prefix doc: to search through your files, whereas on Raycast, you need to set up an alias and enter the extension. Both have file preview
- Raycast has a nice UI that can expand to work well with extensions
- Flow is faster to use. With Raycast you often need to enter an extension to finish your action. To launch a scrip on Flow I just type "r [shortcut] -> enter" while Raycast is "quicklinks -> enter -> [shortcut] -> enter. [edit, with minimal setup using aliases, you can have similar speed. See __jonas comment below]
- Performance-wise, Raycast was often eating my RAM, but a dev mentioned it's expected in the beta, they'll fix it for the launch. Otherwise, both feel snappy
- Both seem to have enough community support and extensions
- I never really tried the AI features, I don't know if it's the right place for me to augment my workflow w/ it
Curious about the experience of others with these tools or similar ones