extensions VS Ferdi

I agree for 99% of extensions their model is amazing. And I wouldn't expect me to come up with a better one any time soon.

The problem is that I want to do more in my launcher. Two examples:

- I wasn't happy with the official bitwarden extension, because going through the clipboard and copy/pasting individual items felt cumbersome. They also only supported one vault even though I asked about this years ago [0]! In raycast I wrote my own bitwarden extension that hooked into Hammerspoon and used the AX spoon to autofill credentials. That felt very hacky though so in my own launcher I am using the accessibility API directly through swift-rs.

- I wanted to build my own keyboard centric matrix chat client into raycast. I got pretty far, but in the end I was just too limited by the available components. Also I discovered that once your extensions heap reaches 100 MiB, it just gets killed. That basically made it impossible to just load the matrix-sdk including crypto.

In the end I just didn't want to keep investing time in some proprietary software that doesn't allow me to do what I want to do :)

[0] https://github.com/raycast/extensions/issues/1544

Raycast creates an open a pull request in their repository, on your behalf!

Check the PR: https://github.com/raycast/extensions/pull/6648

This is the repo: https://github.com/raycast/extensions/tree/abdbd1f0a926fbe7cea5e96f0f2c62f502efa0f3/extensions/mozilla-firefox/

Raycast can do this via an extension: https://github.com/raycast/extensions/blob/c0832985249dcb02164ea6322ca0134ca093e711/extensions/openai-gpt3/

Audit their extensions? This is an Amphethamin extension. Please take a look at the list of dependencies from npm. How much time will it take to audit? https://github.com/raycast/extensions/blob/34c65c7f190ad172e46c75384600aa938f932e98/extensions/amphetamine/package-lock.json

This is how fancier automations like the Raycast extension (source) are built.

It's subscription priced now...? Maybe try Ferdi instead...? Same App but without subscriptions. https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi

Suggesting this one must be cheating https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi

This probably was already a problem in Ferdi. There is/was an issue on github https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi/issues/1458

I use Ferdi to multiplex my messaging apps and have them all in one place. It's basically a glorified web browser that only opens iframes to specific pages (eg: discord). In this environment Discord has some interesting behavior where the menu bar at the top left is very slow to respond, and despite large window sizes (and refreshing at these large window sizes) the screen always seems to be in a single column layout, never showing the chat messages + channel list at the same time.

I just noticed the getferdi.com website is up again including a video, link to the code etc.

Then you can use https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi, which is a unrestricted Fork of Franz

Ferdi (Website, GitHub): Free fork of Franz. Announced on June 11, 2022 that "There will be no further updates to Ferdi. 🏄‍♂️" but that tweet is now deleted and the repo is updating again... But they've disabled the issue tracker behind a $9/month paywall.

I see that the repo is back (https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi)