Launch Apps by What They Do, Not What They’re Called

Here is a small test. Without looking, what is the name of the app on your Mac that records your screen? The one that opens .epub files? The PDF editor you installed in March for one job?

If you know all three, a launcher that searches by name works perfectly for you. Most people get one of the three. The other two end up as a scroll through the Applications folder.

Every launcher searches names

Spotlight, Alfred and Raycast are all very good at the same thing: you type a few letters of an app’s name and it is there. They learn what you pick and put it first. For the apps you use every day, nothing beats that.

But it is a lookup by name, so it needs the name. Type "messaging" and you will not get WhatsApp, Telegram or Messages, because none of them has "messaging" in its name. Type "video editor" and you will get web suggestions, maybe a document, and only by luck the app you actually own.

Some launchers let you add aliases by hand, so you can teach them that "chat" means Slack. That works if you set it up ahead of time for the apps you already know you will forget.

Searching apps by purpose

Dhito finds apps on two axes:

1. By name. Typing "chr" finds Chrome. Names are matched directly, because nothing beats a prefix match for speed. 2. By what the app is for. Typing "messaging app" finds WhatsApp, Telegram and Messages. "Something that opens PDFs" finds Preview and any other PDF app you have. "Email" finds Mail, Outlook or Spark, whichever you installed.

Apps appear under their own 🚀 pill, pinned above your file results so they never get buried. Press Enter and the app opens.

How it knows what an app is for

The tricky part is that macOS does not store a description of each app anywhere. Even App Store apps come with an empty description field. So Dhito writes one, on your Mac, from what each app does say about itself:

• Its category. App Store apps declare one, like "social networking" or "photography". It is coarse: Safari, Mail, Pages and Preview all say "productivity". And about one app in seven, Chrome included, has no category at all. Useful, but not enough.
• The kinds of link it handles. This turns out to be the best clue. An app that opens http links is a browser. One that opens mailto links is an email app. One that opens tg or sms links is for messaging. This is how Chrome gets found as a browser despite having no category.
• The file types it opens. This is what answers "something that opens PDFs" or "an app for .epub".
• A short line for well-known apps. No amount of reading an app’s settings will tell you that Figma is for design. So for the apps most people have, Dhito simply says what they are for. Everything else falls back to the three clues above.

Those descriptions are then indexed by the same local model that indexes your documents, so "messaging", "chat", "texting" and "talk to people" all land in the same place. The app index is rebuilt when you install or remove apps, which takes about a second.

None of it leaves your Mac.

Where it helps

• Apps you use rarely. The screen recorder, the disk utility, the font manager. You know what they do, not what they are called.
• New Macs and shared Macs. On someone else’s machine you do not know what they installed. "Spreadsheet" finds Numbers or Excel, whichever is there.
• "Which apps do I have for this?" Type "photo editor" and see all of them at once. It is a quick way to find out you already own the thing you were about to buy.
• Opening a file in something specific. Combined with the right-click Open With list on a file result, you can get from "this file" to "the right app for it" without remembering any names.

Where a name search is still better

To be fair to the classic launchers:

• For apps you know, they are a touch faster. A purpose search does more work than a prefix match. If you are opening Safari forty times a day, any launcher is fine.
• They do more. Raycast and Alfred have clipboard history, snippets, workflows and window management. Dhito does none of that. Its jobs are finding files, launching apps and running file tools on what it finds.
• Purpose descriptions are only as good as the clues. An obscure app with no category, no link types and no file types gets a thin description, and may only be found by name.

The setup a lot of people end up with is their usual launcher on ⌘Space and Dhito on a second hotkey, for when they know what they want but not what it is called, or are looking for a file rather than an app. There are side-by-side comparisons with Raycast, Alfred and Spotlight, and more about the feature on the app launcher page.

Launchers have searched by name for twenty years because names were the only thing available. Once there is a model on the Mac that understands what words mean, the app you want can be found from a description of what it does, the same way a file can be found from a description of what is in it.