Raycast

Raycast turns the launcher into an application platform. A single hotkey opens a list filtered by fuzzy typing, but the real move is that each result can push its own view: a clipboard history with previews, a window-management grid, a snippet form, a third-party extension's detail screen. Navigation is uniformly keyboard-driven — arrow keys move, Enter drills in, Cmd-K opens a contextual action menu on whatever row is selected, and Escape pops the stack. That action menu is the quiet genius; it keeps secondary commands discoverable without cluttering the row. The aliasing and ranking learn from use, so frequent items float up. The cost is conceptual weight: the root feels less like a search box than an operating system you must learn.