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Show HN: Raycast (YC W20) – Spotlight for Developers (raycast.com)
18 points by thomaspaulmann on Oct 29, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 9 comments



Tried it out and really liked it. I'm an Alfred user as well, and am wiring them up for side-by-side competition between Cmd-Space and Option-Space.

Seems like you're really pushing next level integration with things like Jira and GitHub, so I found it a little sad face that both Jira Server and GHE weren't yet supported.

I'm sure that's where the monetization down the road might land, but the area where these productivity tools would really help me out is at the day job.


Jira Server and GHE weren't a focus yet. With the right amount of demand we want to pick it up. That said, it seams that Atlassian deprecates Jira Server the sooner or later: https://www.atlassian.com/migration/journey-to-cloud?jobid=1...


I just downloaded it. Looks nice.

Using it has revealed something frustrating that dates back to when I worked on Spotlight (then called Matador) in 2003. Someone (not named to protect the guilty) decided that file extensions should override file magic type detection. Now all my Typescript files are identified as MPEG-2 Transport Stream files. Wrong!

Finder won't show the text preview, which means Raycast won't show a preview. Is there anyway to get Raycast to do the right thing?


Some nice details there... We're relying on Apple's Quick Look preview right now but are considering to build something custom especially for text files which should cover your Typescript ones.


Hey all

Thomas from the Raycast team here. We're super excited to open up Raycast to everyone and share it with the HN community today.

We built Raycast because we're fed up with chasing around browser tabs and tools to get work done. The simplest things take way too many clicks. Not to mention the time spent in front of loading indicators on websites. With Raycast, you can control your tools with a few keystrokes. The command line inspired interface unifies tools as commands to cut through the noise.

We launched a first version of the app a few months ago [1]. Since then we revamped the entire user interface, added new extensions and made it possible to extend the functionality with scripts. Here are a few examples what you can do:

- Launch apps or search files on your Mac - Create, search and close issues in Asana, GitHub, Jira or Linear - Check upcoming meetings - Join conference calls with a single keypress - Approve, merge and close GitHub pull requests - Convert units, check dates and solve equations with a powerful calculator - Much more and if that isn't enough, you can extend Raycast with scripts

The app is built natively for macOS (100% Swift) to be simple, lightweight and efficient. No login is required to get started. We hope you join the Raycast community and we'd love to get your feedback.

Also, I'm super happy to answer questions!

As a little gift, we added a Hacker News command to Raycast to quickly check the latest tech news. You know, when you have some minutes while waiting for the compilation of your app to complete.

[1] Previous launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22466994


Congrats on the launch Thomas - I liked your previous landing page, but this new one is even better.

Nice job on the seed round too!


Thanks! Yeah, the previous one had some nice retro charm. We are now in the modern age :D


This looks really cool! Do you want to focus on developer productivity tools only or expand to other applications as well?


Raycast is intended for developers but we had designers, product managers and others in our private beta that enjoy our built-in extensions for Jira, G Suite and Zoom. You can read more about our plan to grow a community around productivity tools here: https://raycast.com/blog/hello-world




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