Desktop Utilities

Flow.Launcher15.9k★

Flow Launcher is a keyboard-driven search bar for Windows. Hit a hotkey, type, and instantly open apps, find files, run web searches, or do quick calculations without ever touching the mouse. It's MIT licensed and completely free, with a plugin store for extending it. Under the hood it taps the Everything search engine and the Windows index for fast file search, and the plugin API (Python, C#, JavaScript, F#) lets the community add things like Spotify control, Steam game launching, and window switching. Install is trivial through the installer, Winget, Scoop, or Chocolatey. No server, no config. Anyone who used Alfred or Raycast on a Mac and missed that speed on Windows will feel right at home. Raycast now ships a Windows version too, and Flow Launcher is the free, open answer to it there: no AI or cloud sync, but a mature plugin store. Anyone on Windows who lives on the keyboard should install it. No team-size calculus here, it's free for everyone. Two catches. It's Windows-only, so there's nothing here for Mac or Linux users. And because plugins are community-made, quality and maintenance vary, so a plugin you rely on might go stale.

Vicinae10.4k★

Vicinae brings a Raycast-style launcher to Linux. Hit a hotkey to search apps, files, clipboard history, emoji and browser tabs, expand text snippets anywhere, and install many Raycast extensions straight from Raycast's own store. GPL-3.0 and free, with a macOS beta and a Windows build that just left alpha. There's nothing to host, but setup depends on your desktop. Wayland is the main target, X11 is less polished, GNOME wants a companion extension for clipboard and window features, and on some compositors you bind the global hotkey yourself. On a Mac it needs Apple Silicon and macOS 14 or newer. Telemetry is on by default (a daily ping with your OS, desktop and screen setup), with a settings toggle to turn it off. Linux users: install it, it's the closest thing to Raycast there. On a Mac, Raycast's free plan is still more polished, and Sol (ospfranco/sol) is the simpler open option. On Windows, Flow Launcher (Flow-Launcher/Flow.Launcher) has the longer track record. No paid tier, and no AI yet. The catch: Raycast extension support is partial and borrowed. The project's own test sheet confirms only a small slice of the store working, many extensions are built around macOS, and store access runs through Raycast's servers, which Raycast could cut off. Window management is a switcher, not snap-to-halves layouts.

DigUp5.6k★

DigUp searches your computer by what's inside your files, not what they're named. Type "a dog on the beach" and it finds the photo; type "the clause about pets in the lease" and it opens the PDF page. It runs Google DeepMind's EmbeddingGemma 2 model on your own machine, and it's free and MIT licensed. The Mac build (Apple Silicon, macOS 14+) is stable. Windows and Linux are in beta, and the Windows installer still isn't signed. First launch downloads an 865 MB model, then reads the folders you pick: minutes on a Mac, hours for a big photo library on a PC without a good graphics card. Nothing you index leaves the machine. Code search is opt-in. There's no paid tier, and the model weights are Apache 2.0 too. Solo and small teams: free. Larger teams: free per machine, but every index is personal. The catch: it's two weeks old. Update the Mac app to 0.6.2, which fixed the battery drain and a high-severity bug that let a copied repo's git settings run a program during code search. A memory runaway on certain PDFs is still open, and the Linux beta's setup estimate can read folders you never listed.

Sol3.2k★

Sol is a free Mac launcher that packs Raycast's everyday built-ins into one app: app search, window tiling into halves, thirds and quarters, clipboard history, a calendar with your next meeting in the menu bar, emoji, a scratchpad note, translation and quick links. MIT licensed, macOS 14 or newer. Install it with brew install --cask sol and it updates itself. No account, no server. You can add your own shell or AppleScript commands by dropping files in a folder. Release builds send crash reports to Sentry, and the maintainer builds and notarizes releases on his own machine rather than through public CI. People who mostly use Raycast for launching apps, snapping windows and clipboard history can switch and lose little. Anyone who depends on Raycast extensions or snippets can't: Sol has no plugin system and no text expansion. There's no paid tier. For extensions, Vicinae (vicinaehq/vicinae) runs many Raycast ones, though its Mac build is still a beta. The catch: it's one developer's project. He writes nearly all of it and ships often, but an open crash-on-launch report on macOS 26 shows how much rides on one person. Clipboard history is also cleared on restart unless you turn saving on.

crosspaste-desktop2.7k★

CrossPaste syncs your clipboard across Mac, Windows, and Linux in real time. Copy on one machine, paste on another. Supports text, URLs, HTML, RTF, images, colors, and files. Everything stays on your local network with end-to-end encryption. No cloud server involved. Runs as a desktop app built with Kotlin and Compose Multiplatform. No server to set up. Devices discover each other automatically on the same network. Uses asymmetric encryption for security and SQLite for local storage. Smart cleanup keeps clipboard history from eating your disk. Free for everyone. No paid tier, no accounts, no telemetry. Solo developers working across multiple machines will use this daily. Teams in the same office get effortless sharing without any IT setup. The catch: LAN-only means no syncing between home and office unless you set up a VPN. If you need cloud sync across locations, this is not the tool. Look at paid options or set up Syncthing as a workaround.

tendedero2.5k★

Tendedero hangs every screenshot you take on a thin line just under the macOS menu bar, out of sight until you rest the pointer at the top of the screen. Click a shot to copy it, press and hold to mark it up, drag it into an app or folder, or drag it to the Trash to let it go. It's free, the code is MIT, and the whole app is 1.7 MB. Setup is a signed, notarized DMG or brew install --cask alejandrobujan/tap/tendedero, on macOS 14 or later. On first launch it offers to take over your screenshots: no floating thumbnail, nothing landing on the Desktop, and your old settings come back when you quit. Screen recordings hang too, and you can trim them in place. No account, no network access, no analytics. Solo, small teams, bigger teams: free, with nothing to buy or deploy. The catch: it's a shelf, not a screenshot tool. Capture still comes from macOS's own shortcuts and markup is Apple's Markup, so anyone wanting capture, annotation and share links in one app is shopping for CleanShot X. And the license reserves the name and icon, so a fork has to rebrand.

UniClipboard1.9k★

UniClipboard is copy on one computer, paste on another. Text, images, and files sync between your devices directly, encrypted end to end, with no account and no company server holding your clipboard. It is what Apple's Universal Clipboard does, except it includes your Windows and Linux machines. AGPL v3 and free. Desktop is the solid part. Windows, macOS, and Linux get first-class apps plus a uniclip CLI, installed through Homebrew, a curl script, or deb, rpm, and AppImage packages. You create a space with a passphrase and invite other devices with a short-lived code. No server needed for desktops. Encryption is XChaCha20-Poly1305, with Argon2id protecting the passphrase. Free at every size with no paid tier. Solo users with a mixed-OS desk are the audience. Teams should not roll it out: there are no admin controls, and the stable line is still 0.x while a fast-moving 1.0 alpha ships several prereleases a week. syncthing/syncthing is the mature choice for files, not clipboards. The catch: phones are second class today. The iOS and Android apps use a compatibility mode that is not peer to peer. It works on your LAN, and crossing networks means hosting a server node or running Tailscale. That listener is plain HTTP with Basic Auth until TLS arrives in v2, and iOS cannot sync in the background. Telemetry is on by default, and one person maintains the whole thing.