g1ntas

I heard about LaunchBar, never suspected it was originator of “launcher” apps. Probably because it has quite modern design.

If you are looking for a new alternative, try Raycast. It’s supposedely better than Alfred, though for my taste it had too many features (same could be said about Alfred).

I guess, the MacOS native Spotlight influenced the growth of more indie “launchers”. Especially, Spotlight being quite limited customization wise.

I personally lately leaning towards niche launchers like:

* https://blipnotes.app for note taking;

* https://shortcat.app for “clicking” interface without a mouse;

* https://dashlook.app for searching git repositories/pull requests (disclaimer: I am the creator).

It just provides better experience compared to Alfred’s community plugins (usually not maintainted).

The problem with separate apps though, is that you need to remember dedicated shortcuts for each of them. On the other hand I had the same experience with Alfred, only that you need to remember specific command/keyword.

If anyone knows more niche “launchers”, I would be very interested to learn about them.

Boilerplate generator tool. It’s a single binary (compared to most JS based solutions e.g. Yeoman), and also it supports scripting within template files, which allows to handle some edge cases (in my experience most common problem with such tools).

https://github.com/g1ntas/accio

I didn’t want to separate scripts from templates, because of context switching, so I implemented custom markup language, to make code and template live together in single file. I am actually quite proud of the end result.

However, there’re still quite some features missing, and I am taking a break now to focus on other projects.