Making my own MacOS Application Launcher (vibe coded)
I recently purchased a MacBook Neo, it's a pretty snappy little machine but I was unhappy with the performance of Spotlight for launching Apps. It's crazy how sluggish spotlight feels, even with everything turned off.
It's so bad an entire thriving ecosystem of third party launchers exist. Over the years I've tried a bunch of them.
I was previously a happy user of Raycast, but recently they decided to do React Native rewrite, (presumably for cross platform compatibility). I'm not a huge fan of this direction (I want something native) and the newer version has a tonne of features I don't use and feels completely overkill for my needs.
I tried out Alfred, and the visual style and settings UI look completely dated and out of place on the latest MacOS release.
My criteria from a launcher is stupidly simple: I want to type Command+F start typing the name of an app and instantly get results. No extra bullshit: no web search, no file indexing, nothing. Just applications.
This took a couple of hours with Claude Code and I'm pretty happy with the results. I don't plan to add any extra features. I'd distribute it, but I don't want to have to pay Apple $$$ to properly sign a release.
You can find the code on Github: https://github.com/Jackevansevo/launchy