Show HN: Gauntlet – Raycast-inspired open-source application launcher

Show HN: Gauntlet – Raycast-inspired open-source application launcher(github.com)

4 points by exidex 2 years ago | 3 comments

Hi everyone, about a year ago I discovered Raycast and really liked the idea of it: writing plugins in React and TypeScript. But Raycast is available only on macOS and I am hopping between different OS quite a lot. It also isn't open source, which is not a huge deal but would have been nice to have. So I decided to create my own, because it looked like it could be a lot of fun and the scope was manageable for a single person.

I went with plugin-first approach focusing on plugin APIs, everything builtin plugins provide (and more) can be also implemented by any plugin. At the moment API surface is minimal but usable, I want to work on creating plugin documentation before extending it further.

Plugins are distributed as part of Git repository, meaning no central server is required.

For JS runtime Gauntlet is using using Deno, which, among other things, gives nice security model allowing to be explicit about things plugins can do on your system.

Gauntlet is also designed with cross-platform in mind from the start. Currently supporting Linux with macOS and Windows support coming in near future.

Please join Discord server if you want to follow for updates or interested in creating a plugin. You can find the link in the beginning of the README. It is currently pretty empty in here but hopefully not for long.

SebastianKra 2 years ago |

Nice I'm kinda hoping that an Open-Source alternative to Raycast will eventually replace Command Line Interfaces outright. Like how Browsers offer primitives for responsive interfaces, these could become a platform for textual command/response interfaces...

I was positively surprised that you already have the React reconciler and interface components. I couldn't find the SWR hooks though.

Also, the interface isn't pretty atm.

And without knowing Raycast, I wouldn't understand why this is awesome. The Video could probably show more practical examples than Game of Life. Maybe have a short video of "here's how you implement a basic list-based command in 15 lines of code".

exidex 2 years ago | |

> I couldn't find the SWR hooks though.

What do you have in mind?

> Also, the interface isn't pretty atm.

Agreed, creating pretty UIs is not my strongest suit if I am completely honest, and could use a help with that. But I have been polishing it up steadily, though sometimes it is an uphill battle with iced-rs.

> The Video could probably show more practical examples than Game of Life

Also agreed. Game of Life demo was supposed to show the interactivity of a view and was easy to implement but at some point I would like to add something more usable as a builtin plugin. For the code example I think it would be better to have that in documentation which is the next on my TODO list

All in all, good points

SebastianKra 2 years ago | | |

https://developers.raycast.com/utilities/react-hooks/useexec

useExec, useFetch and useSql these hooks follow the stale-while-revalidate principle, which handles fetching, refetching and caching. In combination with Raycasts loading indicators, this allows developers to work directly with the remote data without having to worry about loading/error states.