History of the launcher

[ Category - Programming ][ Category - Essays ]

A small review of the launcher

So Alfred is a category of software which is called a “launcher”, which is basically a search box like the windows start button, where you type in an application and it gets launched. Then people started baking more commands into the launcher.

Dev 1: why search for the file explorer in the launcher and then search for a file? Why not just search for the file in the launcher?

Dev 2: Doesn't the violate some unix principle?

Dev 1: Uh... can you pretend that the launcher is an interface and I'm uh... piping the output of other programs into it and uh... on every keystroke I decide which program to pipe into it?

Dev 2: Awesome! Very unix-y of you!

And so the floodgates were open. Any computation could be run on a launcher, with a quick slap-on prefix. Want to calculate something? just prefix with cal want to run a terminal command? Just prefix with >. Translate? Fuzzy search? Acronym? Emoji picker? Just add prefix!

Far from its humble roots, the launcher became some people's main interface to the computer. In a way it is the ultimate synthesis of GUI and terminal. The dialectic, started from text-only dummy terminals of the mainframes of yore and refuted by the pure GUI abandonment/heretical view of anything programmer-y.

The overloaded launcher is truly the pure middle of the two.