AppLauncher

Short version: I made AppLauncher for macOS. It’s a very fast app launcher/switcher, and for me replaces Spotlight entirely.

Decades ago the Mac had a fancy launcher app called Quicksilver. You could launch an app without even thinking about it because the interface went so fast. Apple’s built in Spotlight feature was at the time a mere “search slowly for things on my slow disk” search app, totally unsuitable for launching apps because it was so slow and did so many other things. Eventually Apple Appled Quicksilver, and made Spotlight work almost as well as Quicksilver for launching apps, so I switched to that.

Over the years, and especially with the latest “Tahoe” version of macOS, Apple Appled Spotlight to the point that it is now as crummy and slow and buggy as it was decades ago. There is always a noticeable lag when popping up the Spotlight window with the hotkey. Sometimes, for a day or two at a time, Spotlight for some reason stops including apps in the Applications folder in its search results thereby making it worse at launching/switching apps than having no launcher/switcher at all! There are other app launcher apps out there like Alfred, and Quicksilver still seems to be around; but both are more complicated than I can rightly understand, so I don’t want to run them.

So I used Claude Code to whip up the simplest possible launcher I could think of: AppLauncher only launches apps. You can download a .dmg image and install it yourself. It’s still kind of ugly. It never slows down while it indexes the whole disk, and it will never change at all unless you download and install a new version, which ideally will never be necessary. It has synonyms hardcoded for term to launch Ghostty, and for pref to launch System Settings (which used to be called Preferences or System Preferences or something). It’s instantaneous on every computer I’ve tried it on (both of them) and it’s exactly what I want.

Maybe it will be useful to someone else, also.

I’m really quite pleased about this whole AI coding assistant thing. Stuff goes fast.