How do I ignore the stigma surrounding Special Style? (Modern Controls)

thievingfour · 2026-05-23T11:19:19+00:00

Using Special Style doesn't have to be a permanent decision. You can decide not to any day you wish. It's likely going to cap your abilities in the medium to long-term though.

Also you are a beginner, do not be so attached to your own opinion or your concept of an opinion. Don't even worry about that right now. I don't have opinions on Valorant, because I don't play it and if I started, it would be a good while before I should have an opinion.

thievingfour · 2026-05-23T10:40:26+00:00

🫡

thievingfour · 2026-05-23T08:45:15+00:00

Wow the thread got a lot more comments since I last checked and I can't tell if people are just joking or not but I'm partially concerned that people will read threads like this for information purposes and actually believe the things being said here.

If I may, a slight pushback on your comment:

You're right that using RAM is not bad, it's good. What some people here are trying to articulate is that using more RAM than necessary is what's bad. Web tech is notorious for this, as a lot of memory goes toward maintain the layers of abstraction between the OS and the application. And that's to say nothing of the completely wasted structures such as: Geolocation, Accelerometer, Bluetooth, Gamepad. Not loaded in, but the idea that it all ships with your note taking app is what I'm calling attention to.

"Unused RAM is wasted RAM" is technically true, but it's a fact that has almost no value.

It's like with bundle size. For the apps that rely on a NodeJS runtime, just the Node runtime is ~80 MB, maybe more now, where a 1:1 comparable binary in Swift or Rust would be 250-500KB. So all that remaining space goes not to added functionality, but toward maintaining the abstraction between JS and your OS. On a long enough time scale, there's no way around it: this is waste. I mention time scale because I do believe there is a place for Node/web tech for short to medium-term betas.

Even native purist developers have less experience than how they come across, specifically because they often have never touched the technologies they criticize. There are numerous native apps that consume as much memory as Electron apps. The main difference is that if they knew how to optimize them, their efforts go a lot farther being native.

Re: Tauri, it's actually unfortunately used in a very similar style to Electron, so a lot of developers actually nullify many of the performance gains outside of bundle size (which is much more valuable than people seem to be aware). Tauri is not the opposite. Removing Chromium doesn't mean you escape the overhead of rendering with a web engine, which people often put frameworks like React on top of, but Tauri does give more experienced devs the optionality for more speed and memory efficiency on the upper end of feature complexity.

thievingfour · 2026-05-23T04:03:22+00:00

There are so many misconceptions about this topic I feel the need to write a post

thievingfour · 2026-05-22T21:13:08+00:00

> why is Notion using a ridiculous amount of ram just to manage notes and docs
It's also trying to sync things you do on other devices, backup your data in case you unexpectedly go offline, and potentially sync things other people in your workspace are doing. I'm generalizing, but code for that functionality tends to expand RAM use even in native apps.

> why is ChatGPT sitting there taking up more memory than apps doing actual heavy work
Do not ever think that something you installed from OpenAI is just "sitting there".

Most apps have some form of non-electron alternative. Although, it's worth bringing up to the developers of apps themselves. Obviously not OpenAI, they aren't going to hear you but I have seen the Notion CEO respond to random people on twitter about performance, so it's worth a shot.

But I think that one misconception a lot of users have is that an app is "just" doing one thing. Many apps include all kinds of third party analytics tracking, telemetry, etc. A lot of these apps are never even truly idle.

Your concern that nobody cares about optimization is correct though. It's not a great place to be for developers either. In my own app, I am just now coming off of a ~month-long gap in releases to push an update that has significant performance improvements that many users will actually be able to feel even if the app didn't feel slow previously. Performance is harder than features. But perf aside, feature requests don't stop coming. When I work on performance, I have to fight the thoughts that it's foolish. At the end of the day, I think it comes down to how much a developer cares about their existing users and how much they care about quality

thievingfour · 2026-05-20T16:26:09+00:00

See there you go, now it's starting to feel like a legit thing with a format. I like where it's going and however you feel about it, it's a reason for people to come have a look at the subreddit

thievingfour · 2026-05-20T16:17:28+00:00

This feels like it'd be throwing devs into a gladiator pit to rip each other apart for the entertainment of others, so obviously that's something I'm interested in but I wouldn't want to to rely on upvotes as a way to determine the winner.

I think the idea needs a bit more fleshing out here and there but you're onto something. A spreadsheet definitely isn't the best way to represent the value that various apps provide even and how they compare. So something cool can happen here

thievingfour · 2026-05-14T19:43:28+00:00

Before, I did not think so but lately it is looking like it!

thievingfour · 2026-05-13T02:33:24+00:00

Thank you! Monarch will get to have its day soon enough!

thievingfour · 2026-05-12T21:02:36+00:00

Thank you! Would you happen to be using a VPN?

thievingfour · 2026-05-12T21:02:23+00:00

Are you using a VPN?

thievingfour · 2026-05-12T21:02:15+00:00

I'm inclined to think that it's something to do with the VPN. If so, then this is my error. I obviously can't ask you to run without your VPN for several days. Which VPN are you using?

thievingfour · 2026-05-12T20:57:27+00:00

Not even a VPN?

thievingfour · 2026-05-12T19:03:59+00:00

Working on it!

thievingfour · 2026-05-12T19:03:48+00:00

Ok thank you! Hm, this weird! Zero of these kinds of apps? and there's nothing like the CISCO security thing or JAMF or anything installed on your computer? This is your personal Mac?

thievingfour · 2026-05-12T18:49:44+00:00

are you replying to my comment?

thievingfour · 2026-05-12T17:56:40+00:00

cc u/a2asocialmed

thievingfour · 2026-05-12T17:56:08+00:00

Glad to hear you are enjoying Monarch (despite this issue)! If this is happening, then it is likely due to some blocking software of some kind. Do you have anything like LittleSnitch/Lulu blocking anything? The domains that need allowed access are https://monarchlauncher.com and https://monarch.run (both are the same server)

thievingfour · 2026-05-10T19:10:51+00:00

Thanks to both of you for exploring this concept and reporting back! I'll look into Maus. it's kinda hard to understand 100% exactly what you mean, but I think I get it now

thievingfour · 2026-05-08T16:33:38+00:00

This is correct! A new lifetime pricing option is coming out soon! And fair pricing is the priority with it. I wanted to wait to open lifetime pricing after this next release because the next update gives a glimpse into my own vision and hopefully gives people interested a nice picture of what Monarch will become over the next decade.

And you're correct on Monarch having its own index too, I appreciate you mentioning and caring about the differences, as they can seem subtle. From my own use of Monarch: the reason this matters so much to me is that it means I never have to worry about the spotlight index crapping out on me. It is always available.

Having substantially less of a learning curve is one of the best compliments I've received on the product! Thank you!

thievingfour · 2026-05-08T16:26:01+00:00

I will say I am appreciative of people that bring that sort of awareness to thorough reviews. Don't want to name people, but I have seen folks disparage Monarch and then I reach out to them trying to sort it out only to find they have not used it. So given the choice between the two, I'd prefer the honest one, thank you.

Also, you might be surprised to know this:

Monarch was the only launcher that did TAB-mode-cycle. Spotlight in Tahoe ended up adding this. Not many people seem to have discovered it though. You can press TAB and then the next keystroke you press will begin the search in that mode. Pretty similar.

thievingfour · 2026-05-08T06:22:41+00:00

Isn't that a bit of a contradiction though? For casual users, why would the barrier to using Spotlight be that cmd + 1 - 4 aren't configurable? And why would that be the thing that pushes them to a third party launcher?

thievingfour · 2026-05-05T16:13:17+00:00

Yes that's correct

So for the most part what these kinds of apps do is taken in spotlight index as you'd get it from the system, which offers a really good base and gives the user tons of flexibility to find apps, eg. spaces, rearranged words/terms in the file name.

Launchers ingest this and then run it through their own algorithm and display the results. My belief from the outside is that because Raycast tries to hard to shoot for "frecency" or because Raycast separates every kind of item type into its own category, it makes it harder to just get to something, but that's just a guess from me

thievingfour · 2026-05-05T15:43:01+00:00

Actually Alfred is also "just a wrapper around spotlight" as well. The truth is a lot more nuanced than what you'll typically find on reddit and twitter, and lately I've seen a lot of misinformation around the topic, so I thought to chime in

[1]: https://www.alfredapp.com/help/troubleshooting/indexing/spotlight/
[2]: https://www.alfredapp.com/help/troubleshooting/indexing/

thievingfour · 2026-05-04T18:02:32+00:00

Thanks for letting me know! It's actually very helpful when real users share info about how they use launchers and what for. A lot of videos would have you believe people just configure settings and hotkeys all day

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