There was a time, when I could swear my allegiance to one app launcher or another, as long as it was not Spotlight. At first, I believe, I started using the free version of Alfred some years ago, but then I moved over to Launchbar when I realized that Alfred still pretty much relies on the Spotlight index for everything. At the time, I had manually knocked out the Spotlight indexing process, in order to save CPU cycles and spare my HDD (yeah, it was quite some time ago). Launchbar builds its own index and it is very fast and fine-grained to exactly an app launcher would need.
I am still used Launchbar as my day-to-day app launcher, even though it has been years since I stopped disabling the Spotlight indexing process. I still don't like the Spotlight UI, but am aware that the index is used in many more apps beyond the app launching itself.
I am interested to know if you are still using a custom app launcher for macOS. I f yes, I would like to hear your reasons, and perhaps, get a few new interesting automation tips from you. Drop me a line in the comments.
Top comments (6)
I'm using uBar (taskbar app for OSX), wouldn't want to live without it. In my opinion the Dock and Mission Control are inferior compared to the simple taskbar utilized by Windows and Linux (Gnome) ... I know that OSX "evangelists" don't agree, but I know what's my preference.
Wow, uBar is definitely I have missed out there. It's a bit pricy, but if you really stand by it, I would definitely want to give it a try. Thanks for pointing it out.
I see it's 30 dollars now, maybe I paid less, think they raised the price a bit ... but it's a one time purchase, definitely more than worth the price for me! :-)
I'm a big fan of Alfred. At first I used the free version because I only relied on it as a global searcher. Ever since I bought the Powerpack, I'm using the custom workflows, text snippets, and clipboard history manager.
I'm sure Launchbar also has that stuff, but because I found out about Alfred first I didn't feel like trying to learn Launchbar. 🙃
I used to be an avid Alfred user, but Spotlight has come a long way. I’ve been using it happily for at least a couple of years, and don’t feel the need for anything different.
I hide the Mac bar and use Alfred with the Power pack. Here's my full setup with tooling if you're interested, mac.iamdeveloper.com