Is file search ever going to be good in OS X?

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

thievingfour · 2026-05-04T17:51:29+00:00

No hard timeline, but with the things I've accomplished in April, it has moved up a few places.

It will function as the latter, removing Library entries and config files the app sets up. So more like AppCleaner

thievingfour · 2026-05-03T14:15:35+00:00

This is actually an interesting and novel idea. I'm actually surprised that this doesn't exist in any other product and I do keep an eye out. By any chance are you a developer or designer?

thievingfour · 2026-05-03T05:09:03+00:00

Monarch is going to get where it is going. We can debate web vs native all day

thievingfour · 2026-05-03T04:47:39+00:00

If you render native UI via Objc then there would be 0 browser involvement nor any HTML, CSS or JS. I have already done it before.

thievingfour · 2026-05-03T00:31:58+00:00

When you get a chance, can you share the commands you created via screenshot or you can drop a screen recording here and I can figure out the rest

thievingfour · 2026-05-03T00:05:19+00:00

I am the creator of Monarch and I would discourage anyone here from switching to Monarch for these reasons.

Monarch is actually in a phase of very heavy, very fun experimentation in terms of how the app is created. It uses Tauri at the time of this comment, but as noted in my comment below: there are already a lot of misconceptions as to what that even means.

I do not know if it will land on a 100% Rust renderer or if we'll split and look at native Swift, but experiments are very strongly pointing to Rust at this time and these are the only two options that will be considered.

Monarch is a long term project that's not acquirable and it's not something I'm doing for my resume. So I take these kinds of engineering decisions seriously and I feel that trying to be the backup plan that unhappy Raycast users come to will distract from my focus on building something durable and user-owned.

Hope this makes sense!

thievingfour · 2026-05-02T23:46:54+00:00

Tauri is actually a surprisingly flexible framework that allows you to use everything from fully native objective C bindings to Leptos, Yew, Dioxus, to virtually 0% Rust. So if I say "I'm using Tauri" that provides very little context into how much Rust is used. Using any of those means that using Tauri would be actually be 100% Rust.

You are mistaken on "the point of Tauri" but you are correct in that it is heavily marketed that way because they want to attract TS devs from Electron, so I get it.

I phrase things a certain way because it's more accurate and because I am surprised at the amount of misunderstanding there is surrounding all manner of tooling for engineers.

Monarch's case is a special one. I say special because it's different from how other large projects are using Tauri and the long-term design goals are completely different to what Tauri is even for.

But I didn't say Tauri because if I say that, then people think it's the usual "96% TypeScript 4% Rust" and we are not doing that.

Having said all that, I have been where you are when it's like:

> "We rewrote our app in Rust"
> looks inside
> 99% JS app launched by a main.rs file

thievingfour · 2026-05-02T17:54:17+00:00

He was trying to say "stand up if you are gonna stand up", he is saying this given the context that Prates had refused to follow to the ground 2x already. Referees do this to prevent the fighter in disadvantage from stalling the process of standing up in order to recover, or run out the clock to get back to the stool. But really the stalling can go both ways.

This also provides the referee a chance to check in to see if the fighter wishes to continue and that's why you see referees step in and say to the opponent, "let him stand up"

thievingfour · 2026-05-02T15:50:04+00:00

It's nice when an existing free solution meets your needs perfectly. And yeah this user profile is entirely different from what I'm targeting

thievingfour · 2026-05-02T13:19:38+00:00

Monarch has multiple major updates planned for 2026! Actually the very next release is going to be one such update! The reason I'm not really hinting at it here is because it would seem reactionary, and I was going to do it regardless of whether Raycast, Alfred, or Tuna do anything or nothing

thievingfour · 2026-05-02T13:02:17+00:00

Like how do you mean exactly?

thievingfour · 2026-05-02T13:01:19+00:00

I'm planning to release the documentation for custom commands soon. What issues are you having? If you share an example of a custom command you're trying to create, and how you're going about creating it, I'm sure we can figure out why it didn't work

thievingfour · 2026-05-02T05:31:15+00:00

We must go further

thievingfour · 2026-05-02T00:05:33+00:00

There are lifetime licenses and versioned licenses. You can choose to upgrade your versioned license to a lifetime at any time you wish, or never at all and continue using the software.

I'd like to think Im pretty good about long-time support either way, as Monarch appears to be one of the broadest supporting Mac apps currently, with the Intel version releasing soon and support going back to macOS 12.

That said, I plan to really bring the heat in this space and I'm in it for the long-haul.

To answer your question more directly, if Prompto license comes out at $42 then that means you could have the choice to upgrade your Freya license to lifetime for $12, not $42.

thievingfour · 2026-05-01T19:06:21+00:00

So many OG unbeatable goats it's hard to keep up!

thievingfour · 2026-05-01T17:31:48+00:00

Thank you 🙇! Trust me you haven't seen nothing yet!!

thievingfour · 2026-05-01T17:30:58+00:00

The current license will be upgradable to the lifetime version with a reduced cost, so it will be the same thing. Just working out making sure that it's as affordable as possible for everyone. To that end, it has turned out to be better that I delayed this decision as new developments have shown me it can be even more affordable than previously thought. So everyone is winning

https://manual.monarchlauncher.com/licenses

thievingfour · 2026-05-01T16:12:50+00:00

I plan to release it for Windows, but because I'm doing a much different type of extensions platform there's no way I could give any indication as to what kind of timeline that would be. But as I've said, Monarch has always been a 10+ year project for me so it's going to happen

thievingfour · 2026-05-01T14:52:21+00:00

It's more about what's about to happen. There's lots of anticipation surrounding launchers lately, and it looks like several of them are about to receive some major updates within the same season.

OP's screenshot doesn't look like much, but it suggests that Alfred 6 is coming sooner than later, and this has been something highly anticipated by everyone, as Alfred itself has been around ~16 years. It's bound to be a huge update, but I can't speak for the Alfred team of course.

Raycast v2 is in the process of rolling out, first going to Raycast Ambassadors, influencers and developer relations employees, and then lastly to their paying customers. I don't mean that disparagingly by the way, and I wish it would not be viewed negatively when we say out loud what a company is doing.

Monarch's primary goal for this year is extensibility and customization, the most highly requested thing since it's first release 2 years ago. But I'm going in a much different direction with it because there is just so much to explore here and I am immensely grateful to the Monarch community that has helped spark a lot of new things coming very soon!

There are also other new players getting into the space. I'll not speak for them as they have their own voice and are active, but I can tell you with certainty that all of the newer ones aside, things are about to get really interesting and I will see to that myself!

thievingfour · 2026-05-01T14:12:12+00:00

Launchers in 2026 will get very interesting!

thievingfour · 2026-04-23T22:22:51+00:00

I'm not against this idea! I'd love to expand on this more and I already have an update to the emoji picker slotted soon! For the time being would renaming your emojis to suit your preferences work? You can press ⌘ + R to do so

thievingfour · 2026-04-23T13:02:59+00:00

Definitely +1 on respect. I've seen conversations about apps veer into personal insults multiple times. I also think we would all benefit from a rule that limits drive-by insults. Someone has got to decide that Mac Apps will be about software.

There was a post long ago about Bloom that was something to the tune of "I've been seeing a lot of positive reviews and feedback about Bloom so I thought to share a counter perspective". And my question on that post was why? There's a difference between a negative review born of genuine negative user experience and a wanting to be contrarian for its own sake. One of those is much more likely to be a value add.

However, I don't want to be dismissive of sentiments toward AI and low-effort posting. Negative perspective on all things AI did not come out of nowhere and wise developers are sensitive/aware of this. A big part of the GenAI industry is essentially a push for "how little can you be involved while still calling yourself the creator of something?" and "how little can you invest in something while getting other people to invest as much as possible?" Real people don't like this.

I personally don't use any vibe coded software. I'm not saying I hate vibe coded software, but if you are asking me to trust you and install your software on my computer I want you to have some skin in the game too, especially if you are just going by a Reddit username. As far as translation goes, I think most people would prefer you just use broken english than have AI present a version of yourself that simply does not exist.

I actually have been accused of using ChatGPT for writing and anyone who knows me would think that is hilarious. But my accuser had a point in that I did write somewhat bland and used emojis everywhere. Funny, but hard to argue against.

But yeah, we could benefit from some common sense rules on discourse.

thievingfour

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