How we made our Mac launcher feel instant by killing slow providers

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There's this thing Spotlight does where you press cmd+space, type two letters, and then wait. Not a long wait. But you can feel it. And once you've felt it enough times you stop trusting it for quick lookups. You reach for the trackpad instead, or you remember you have iTerm open already, or you just don't bother.

That little gap between thinking and seeing is the entire reason Raycast exists, and Alfred before it, and now . Free, macOS 14+. Runs fine next to Spotlight or Raycast - I still have all of them installed because old habits.

If you try it and find a query that feels slow, tell me which one. We'll figure out which tier it landed in and why.

(The other half of the story, why this is Swift instead of Electron, is here.)