App launcher

The launcher is the root screen. It searches applications, System Settings panes, quicklinks, snippets, system actions, window commands, custom commands and built-in commands at once.

↵ opens the selection. ⌘K shows everything else you can do with it.

What an empty query shows

Favorites first, then each category in a fixed order:

Applications → System Settings → Quicklinks → Snippets → System Actions → Window Management → Custom Commands → Commands

Once you type, that structure collapses into a single Results list ordered by relevance.

How matching works

Tinycast scores each field it knows about, in bands. A hit in a higher band always beats a hit in a lower one — this is why a two-letter query lands on the app you meant rather than something with those letters buried in it.

Two rules are worth knowing:

• Identifier fields never subsequence-match. Otherwise almost every query would hit almost every bundle id.
• Bundle ids match with the leading component stripped, so apple.Photos works. Pasting the full com.apple.Photos still matches exactly.

Spotlight alternate names

Apps also match the names macOS itself knows them by, which is why iCal finds Calendar, Address Book finds Contacts, System Preferences finds System Settings, and browser, 浏览器 or 사파리 all find Safari.

Learned ranking

Tinycast learns which result you pick for each query, on device, and floats it up next time.

Selecting a result records every prefix of what you typed — choosing WhatsApp for wha also teaches w and wh, so the app arrives faster each time.

Two things deliberately do not teach it: activating something by its own global hotkey, and picking a favorite from an empty query. Neither is a search.

The boost reorders within a relevance band. It can never make a weaker match kind beat a stronger one, so learning cannot make search feel unpredictable.

Resetting. One entry: ⌘K → Reset Ranking, shown only when that entry has learned data. Everything: Settings → General → Search → Reset.

Learned data stays in launcher-ranking.json in Tinycast's own folder and goes nowhere else.

Search scopes

Settings → General → Search Scopes controls which folders are indexed for applications. A scope is a folder or a single .app.

Defaults cover /Applications, /System/Applications, both Utilities folders, /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications, the Cryptex path where Safari actually lives, ~/Applications, and Finder as an individual bundle.

Enumeration goes one subfolder deep, so /Applications/Blackmagic Design/DaVinci Resolve.app is found without a scope of its own. Anything nested deeper needs its own scope. .app bundles are treated as leaves, never descended into.

Scopes are stored with ~ abbreviated, so a backup taken on one Mac still points somewhere sensible on another. Editing them re-indexes immediately.

Actions on an app

Open ⌘K with an application selected:

Quit Application appears only while that app is running, and quits it gracefully — an app with unsaved work still shows you its save sheet. The menu samples "is running" once when it opens, so the row cannot appear or disappear underneath your cursor.

To quit everything at once, use the Quit All Applications system action, which skips Finder and Tinycast itself.

Per-app hotkeys

Any application can take its own global shortcut, recorded in Settings → Applications. Pressing it toggles that app: focus it if it is not frontmost, hide it if it is.

See Hotkeys for the recorder and the double-tap option.

Hiding things

Settings → Applications has a master Show in launcher toggle plus a checkbox per app, so you can hide the ones you never launch by name without hiding the section.

A hidden row still keeps its shortcut. Hiding changes what search shows, not what works.