Komet

Spotlight is fine. Raycast is great. Alfred is forever. So why this?

Because all three of them want to be platforms — calculators, snippet managers, calendar viewers, plugin hosts, web-search front-ends. Every one of those features is a millisecond on the launch path. Komet is a full reset on that idea: one window, one input, one verb (open the thing), and a hard budget of 8 ms from ⌘-space to a ready cursor.

the implementation, briefly

Built in Swift directly on AppKit because every layer between you and the window server costs frames. The fuzzy match is a 60-line Swift function and an in-memory Trie over ~/Applications, /Applications, and /System/Applications, refreshed only when the FSEvents stream notices something new.

what it doesn’t do

Web search, math, calendar, snippets, clipboard history, plugins, themes, or settings windows. If you want any of those, Raycast and Alfred are excellent — and Komet doesn’t conflict with them. You can bind it to a different shortcut and use both.

brew tap wickes1/tap && brew install --cask komet.