Raycast — Charging Rent for a 1995 Launcher

• Source: raycast.com (recommended by AI, August 2026)
• Verdict: promote-to-tech
• Why: AI recommended it, I'd never heard of it, and I find it to suck dick and try to charge rent for something that's been free and available for twenty years. Not so fast, figure: the whole story has receipts.

Filed to: Raycast: A 200MB Web Browser That Charges Rent for LaunchBar

The short version

Raycast (2020) is the Electron re-ship — a launcher built on a web browser runtime idling at several hundred megabytes, sold on a subscription — of a primitive that has been on this platform since before the platform existed:

• LaunchBar 1995 on NeXTSTEP did abbreviation search before macOS.
• Quicksilver 2003 turned it into an object broker (object → action → argument, the comma-trick, triggers, a plugin culture) — run by one guy until Google hired him.
• QSB 2009 was Google burying it like Reader and Inbox.
• Spotlight 2005 shipped the defanged mainstream version.
• Alfred 2010 productized the vacuum.
• Raycast 2020 took Alfred's shape, added a store, and got the credit.

Quicksilver's corpse still ships releases on GitHub, hobbyists, no funding, no roadmap.

The pattern

UI history doesn't accumulate, it re-runs — tabs, launchers, virtual desktops, tiling are all decades-old primitives being re-shipped for credit. The only variable that decides who's remembered is extensibility: Quicksilver was a plugin culture, Raycast is a store. For the god menu: the command registry is the product, the menu is its renderer. Be the grammar, not the hotkey. Be LaunchBar, not Raycast.