I don't really see any value in such combines.

You want some calculation? Run calc and do the calculation, do you save so much time by replacing the "run calc" step with "open launcher" that it's worth adding more software to your setup?

Have you ever tried a launcher as powerful as Raycast? I can only recommend it. I use it for quick calculations, currency conversions, file lookups, translations, looking up http status codes, joining meetings, finding emojis, quickly checking my calendar, etc. etc. – so, perhaps a singular function might not warrant a launcher, but the sum of functions and keyboard-centric UI make it very valuable for me in my daily workflows.

The reason I don't use this kind of thing, is the time spent parsing the results.

If I write teams, I want to get a single result that will be the teams app on my computer.

I don't want to get a wikipedia entry about teams, a random text document that has "teams" in it, news about microsoft teams, or the price of the latest shitcoin named TEAMS.

All that does is add cognitive load, regardless of whether the app is the first result, seeing and parsing the other results, takes focus away from the work at hand and contributes to fatigue.

I have a browser with an omnibox for the internet, search on my file explorer, and find and ag[1] in my terminal.

Specialized tools for specific jobs.

[1]. ag is like grep but faster also it's 30% shorter to type than ack the other faster grep alternative.

On a Mac, opening the launcher means pressing cmd-space at any time, getting a popup text entry field, typing "1+2", seeing the answer, and hitting esc to dismiss it. That's the entire workflow for operating a calculator, launching an app, searching Google, locating a file, or whatever. I challenge you to do that operation with a separate app more (or even as) efficiently.

There are good tools for doing each of those things separately. A good launcher that allows you to do any of them with such trivial overhead is a huge time saver.

Do you remember the command line command to convert 5:30 IST to PDT? Or convert $70 USD to SGD? Or what 17.3 years in seconds is? Or how many days are between 2024-12-30 and 2025-06-17?

Raycast can all of do that automatically, and the only shortcut you need to know is Cmd-Space.

I use Alfred which is similar. I can do a lot of things with just the launcher. From small things like typing uuid and getting a uuid to open a dev project and launching all the tools needed for it by just typing p [name] where name is autocompleted. Could I open the terminal and do it there instead? Sure. But that is slower than just getting an instant launcher

> do you save so much time by replacing the "run calc" step with "open launcher"

Yes, of course. The "open launcher" is 1 key press, an action you repeat many times a day. And it has 0 delay.

Your "run calc" can't beat this fluid UX

Plenty of people appear to disagree.

"write programs that do one thing and do it well. write programs to work together."

it's sad to see this core principle being increasingly ignored in linux, but i guess that ship sailed a while ago.