Raycast

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Build me a launcher that replaces Raycast — and know why this is ALMOST.

Two things carry the verdict. **An extension store other people write for** is a network effect you cannot build alone. And **latency low enough to replace muscle memory** is a rendering and process problem: the window must be visible with the cursor ready in well under a tenth of a second, cold, every time. Miss that and it is abandoned in a week however good the features are.

STACK
- A native application: Swift and AppKit on macOS, or Tauri if it must be cross-platform. Electron is too slow to open for something bound to a reflex
- SQLite on device for the index and history
- No server, no account, no network. A launcher that phones home sees everything you type

THE MEASUREMENT THAT DECIDES EVERYTHING
- Hotkey to a visible window with a ready cursor: under 50 milliseconds, including the first invocation after a period of idleness
- That means the process stays resident, the window is pre-built and hidden rather than created, and the index is already in memory
- Results appear as you type, ranked, with the first one correct often enough that Enter is pressed without reading. Measure that hit rate against your own usage and tune the ranking to it
- Treat any regression here as the highest-severity bug in the project

WHAT IT SEARCHES
- Applications, indexed at start and watched for changes
- Files through the operating system's own search index. Walking the disk is why homemade launchers are slow
- Browser bookmarks and history, contacts, and system commands — sleep, lock, empty the bin
- A calculator handling arithmetic, units and currency, with rates cached
- Ranking by frecency, with a chosen result training the ranking for that exact query string. That learning is most of why a good launcher feels clever

WINDOW MANAGEMENT
- Move and resize the focused window to halves, quarters, thirds and full screen, bound to shortcuts
- This needs the accessibility permission, requested with a plain explanation of why
- It is one of the most-used features and one of the simplest to build

CLIPBOARD AND SNIPPETS
- Clipboard history with the source application and time, searchable, including images and files
- An exclusion list, and a hard rule that anything copied from a password manager is never stored. Get that wrong once and you have written a credential harvester
- Snippet expansion by keyword with placeholders for the date, the clipboard and a cursor position

EXTENSIONS
- A command is a small module: a keyword, an input, and a function returning a list or an action. Defined as files in a directory, so it can be versioned and shared
- A stable interface for showing a list, a form, a detail view and a toast, so a command author never touches the interface directly
- Each runs in a sandbox with a time limit, and errors are shown rather than swallowed
- The store you cannot build; the three commands you use every day you can, in an afternoon each. Start there and let the list grow from real need

THE PERMISSIONS CONVERSATION
- Accessibility, input monitoring and full disk access, each requested when first needed with a plain reason
- Everything degrades gracefully without them rather than failing silently
- Document exactly what each is used for. An application asking for input monitoring deserves to be questioned, including by its author

OPERATIONS
- Configuration and commands in a plain directory that can be backed up
- No telemetry. Not one event

WHAT MATTERS MOST
The 50 milliseconds and the frecency ranking. Build the window, the index and the ranking, live with it for a fortnight, and add nothing until the first result is usually right.