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Ask HN: Are There Any Application Launchers that are Terminal Emulator?

1 points by barrettondricka a year ago · 2 comments · 1 min read


Application launchers should be terminal emulators.

I am a huge fan of Spotlight, Raycast, Albert, etc.

But they all have some kind of problem, like not being on that platform, or being proprietary, or being a nightmare to modify.

99% of the tools I use (calculator, dictionary) already exist on the command line, except they look ugly and are nowhere close to being "out of the box."

If one were to add good opening/hiding shortcuts, window size, suggestions, and a shell config to a terminal emulator it would be a perfect launcher app.

I know I am doing the typical "FOSS devs please do it for me" request, but I am considering doing it myself, unless someone already went down that rabbit hole before me.

swah a year ago

They exist on Raycast too, what are you missing?

  • barrettondrickaOP a year ago

    e. Raycast doesn't know what the e constant (2.71828) is.

    Their entire calculator is crappy. It took them forever just to get scientific notation and inverse trig functions working.

    Meanwhile, it was all proprietary (so I couldn't do anything myself) and they were busy developing AI. I know they have all the fancy add-ons and scripts, but at that point it is easier to just cmd+tab to the browser for Wolfram Alpha or commandline for numbat calculator.

    I just realized Albert (sort of) work on MacOS, but it is in German for some reason, so I will have figure out configs.

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