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Launch HN: Raycast (YC W20) – CLI-inspired desktop app for non-coding tasks

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11–20 of 81 posts

Re: Launch HN: Raycast (YC W20) – CLI-inspired desktop app for non-coding tasks

#11
post #10

The text rewriting on top of the page is incredibly annoying. It's too much text always changing and it doesn't really give any value. Product looks interesting though!

That's good feedback, we might consider simpler ways to show different possible use cases.

Re: Launch HN: Raycast (YC W20) – CLI-inspired desktop app for non-coding tasks

#12

Looks pretty cool too bad (or maybe, good) I don't use Jira.

Which integrations you would be interested in?

We're going to be adding more integrations in the future, such as GitHub, GitLab, Slack, GSuite and so on, stay tuned.

Re: Launch HN: Raycast (YC W20) – CLI-inspired desktop app for non-coding tasks

#16

I like the idea. My feedback: the name seems like it's going to confuse people. I almost skipped by this post when I saw the name at a glance because I'm not particularly interested in 3D graphics.

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, it crossed our mind that some people familiar with 3D graphics term might get confused. I really hope that there are not too many people in our target audience familiar with it, though I might be wrong :)

Re: Launch HN: Raycast (YC W20) – CLI-inspired desktop app for non-coding tasks

#17
I want something like this, which is why I more or less have the skeleton and something that at least approaches this idea, built organically through time using various utilities. Rofi, some shell scripts, etc.

This is a great idea in theory but much harder to do properly in practice. The idea is only really worthwhile as long as you can really extend it to a lot of things(no one cares about adding an Nth tool that can do GitHub and jira and one more thing).. and that's where this is going to go wrong.

There are reasons the interfaces to many tools that we use are as complicated as they are - it's needed to use the tool to its full effect. In order to achieve the same effect in this tool, you are doomed to constantly reimplement literally the entire interfaces of all the interesting services, just as CLI interfaces.. and that's just not gonna scale.

I'm not into all this YC stuff, but does the YC20 in the title means that someone has funded this idea?

Re: Launch HN: Raycast (YC W20) – CLI-inspired desktop app for non-coding tasks

#18

Is this integrated with the shell? Can I write shell scripts and python scripts to eg. grab today's entries from my gmail calendar, etc

Giving ability to build custom commands with underlying scripts is something that we're going to tackle very soon! Do you have any examples for what kind of things you would want to use it for?

Re: Launch HN: Raycast (YC W20) – CLI-inspired desktop app for non-coding tasks

#20

Looks interesting, excited to see where it goes. It feels to me like something a motivated open source project could do well, too. What's the thing that will get people to pay for this? Slick team/enterprise features?

As you correctly guessed, we're planning to provide features that would be useful to teams and larger organizations. Shared commands, integrations with custom internal tools, shared instant knowledge base and so on.
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