Monarch Extensions

This was previously “Support for raycast extensions”.

OP (@hummingbirdmoth): “This would cover a lot of current requests and attract substantial interest from existing raycast users.”

Developer response

Monarch will be featuring its own unique extensions ecosystem.

After doing research on a couple open source projects, unfortunately supporting Raycast extensions directly presents unique challenges to Monarch that it doesn’t to similar projects.

Besides that, it also presents limitations to Monarch’s extension platform design that just don’t make sense to replicate simply for the ability to port over extensions that would actually be easier to build with Monarch’s API anyway.

Simply porting extensions also runs the risk of setting the expectation that because other launchers do something a certain way that Monarch will do it that way, and as we’ve seen with recent releases from v0.8+ this is not going to be the case.

To be clear I fully expect that Monarch’s Extensions platform will go further and be more powerful than Raycast’s or Alfred’s. I can’t say too much right this moment, but I’ve been thinking on this for quite some time and so far I’ve been able to do things that I was unaware a Mac app could do. It just doesn’t make sense to withhold this power for the sake of parity with tools we intend to surpass.