Aliases

An alias is your own name for a launcher entry. Type ps and get Photoshop; type sh and get the shell script you run every morning.

Aliases work on any entry — applications, System Settings panes, commands, quicklinks, snippets and extension commands.

Setting one

Aliases are edited in Settings, on the row for the item, in any pane that lists launcher items: Applications, System Settings, System Actions, Commands, Quicklinks, and the feature panes.

There is a clear button on the field, and one alias per entry.

This is deliberately not in the ⌘K menu. Renaming something is a settings change, not a thing you do mid-search.

How an alias ranks

From the matching bands:

• A match at the start of an alias ranks the entry first — above everything, including an exact display-name match on something else.
• A match inside an alias ranks alongside Spotlight alternate names.
• A subsequence of an alias never matches. ps will not match an alias of Pixelmator Studio by skipping letters, because that would make short aliases useless.

That first rule is the point: a two-letter alias should win outright, or it is not worth setting.

In the list

A row with an alias shows it as a small chip after the name, so you can see at a glance which entries you have renamed.

Backup and lifecycle

Aliases ride along in settings backups under launcherAliases.

An alias is removed when its target goes — uninstall the app and the alias goes with it, rather than lingering and matching nothing.

Raycast's v2 export carries an alias per command; importing maps the application ones across by bundle id. See Import from Raycast.