Discussion: BetterTouchTool Launcher / Spotlight Replacement (very much work in progress)

Hi Andreas,
I manged to reproduce the misbehavior and think it's could be a timing issue.When you send immediately the first letter after opening the Launcher - this letter is marked and gets deleted when you move on typing.

English India

like volker said above the first character seems to get selected and overwritten when the text is inputted immediately after launcher opens. if it is done with a delay then there is no such issue. attached a screen recording where i was trying to launch outlook. hope this helps!

Back from vacation! :umbrella_on_ground:

Currenty uploading a first new alpha 6.528 (a bit experimental), I hope it will resolve the first character being deleted issue. Responsiveness will improve significantly in the coming days.

One new experimental feature is importing compatible extensions from other launchers (for now only from raycast's open source extensions extensions/extensions at main Β· raycast/extensions Β· GitHub ). Currently these might or might not work and they will definitely look different.

I am guessing that this might be just specific to my own setup but I am having a kind of an issue everytime I try to paste a snippet from the launchers clipboard manager.

Let me explain. I am using Mouseless and the command key is a trigger for its overlay. But whenever I try to paste something from the clipboard manager, it also activates the overlay, requiring me to have to type an escape to disable it. Does it senc a command keypress when its pasting? Any idea how to disable it, there is no ignore app on the Mouseless side.

BTT needs to send cmd+v to paste, but not sure why that would trigger mouseless. Does that app always show whenever you hold cmd?

The first character deletion timing bug was still there but I think I have now been able to consistently reproduce & fix it with 6.532! (uploading)

It’s triggered when it’s just a cmd key tap (ie tap and release). It would not trigger on a cmd press and hold or a regular cmd+v when I regularly paste something. Or could it be the paste from the clipboard manager is so fast it registers as a cmd tap and release? Not too sure.

I no longer get the issue and the launcher performance is much better for me. Thank you!

Here's an app I vibecoded β€” what do you think? Any ideas you could take inspiration from?

It's a Spotlight-type application

Since I'm not a developer, it doesn't have all the Mac-level search capabilities of the real Spotlight.

Current features:

  • A Spotlight-style bar that appears on demand β€” from it, I can search directly on Google using the full Google web interface
  • I can pin websites I use daily, with their login data/cookies saved and persisted
  • For pinned links, I can enable a persist mode that keeps the site cached in the background β€” so even after closing Spotlight, the page stays loaded and I can pick up right where I left off
  • I can switch to a clipboard view directly from the search bar

@Harutyun is this related to BTT? Did you create that using BTT Plugins?

Not at all, it's a separate app, nothing to do with BTT β€” I just suggested it to showcase the feature

@Andreas_Hegenberg I still have the issues with the launcher not being centered on my screen. It is offset to the right slightly. It happens on first launch and then randomly. I have tried all the options for centering the launcher but none of them work consistently.

Screenshot:

BTT Version: 6.550 (2026060601)

MacOS Version: Sequoia 15.7.7

Current position settings:

P.S. Bonus bug: Using the center of top edge settings for the Window Switcher doesn't seem work. It is still vertically centered and slightly to the right. "Centered on screen with mouse" does seem to work correctly though.

could you check whether 6.553 resolves your positioning issues? (uploading, available in ~10 min)

Thanks Andreas! Seems to be fixed. :folded_hands:

This is probably already possible, I just don't know how.

I'd like to have a list of, say, the last 20 items triggered via the launcher.

How can I set this up? Thanks.

I just updated to 6.558 after having been offline over the weekend, and the positioning was noticeably wrong. I had worked a bit to get it to show up correctly several weeks ago using the settings below. I hadn't had any issues since. Did something change wit they way fixed positions are calculated?

Edit: I changed some of the values again, and got it the position back to where I wanted it.

a bug was fixed that caused incorrect positioning. If you had previously tailored the specific numbers to make it work they might fail with the latest alphas now

Thanks, my new numbers definitely make more sense!

I'm also seeing this, it's very slow to load the first time I invoke it in a given session, then is snappy for a while, then an hour later when I launch it again it lags again.