A Raycast-inspired application launcher for Windows, built to be fast and light: instant fuzzy search over your installed apps, a global hotkey, and a minimal RAM footprint.
速い (hayai) — Japanese for "fast".
- Global hotkey (
Alt+Space) opens a frameless, centered, always-on-top search window — repositions itself onto whichever monitor your cursor is on. - Fuzzy search over Start Menu shortcuts and packaged/Store apps (via
shell:AppsFolder), with prefix / word-boundary / consecutive-match scoring. - Recents-first: an empty query shows your most recently launched apps before the rest of the catalog.
- Sharp icons: 48px Hi-DPI icon extraction straight from the shell's system image list, decoded off the UI thread so typing never stutters.
- Keyboard-first:
Up/Downto navigate (first result is always pre-selected),Enterto launch,Escor focus-loss to dismiss back to the tray. - Tray icon: left-click toggles the launcher, right-click opens a small Toggle/Quit menu.
- Runs quietly in the background — dismissing the launcher hides it, it doesn't relaunch or rescan.
Under the hood, results are produced by a small provider pipeline
(CommandProvider/PluginRegistry) designed to grow beyond app search —
file search, a calculator, clipboard history, and more are planned next.
Requires the Rust toolchain and Windows.
git clone https://github.com/ariaryy/hayai.git
cd hayai
cargo run --releasecargo build --release produces target/release/hayai.exe with no console
window attached. There's no installer yet — copy the binary wherever you like
and run it; add it to your Startup folder if you want it running on login.
| Action | Shortcut |
|---|---|
| Open / toggle the launcher | Alt+Space |
| Move selection | Up / Down |
| Launch selected result | Enter |
| Dismiss | Esc, click elsewhere, or Alt+Space again |
| Tray menu (Toggle / Quit) | right-click the tray icon |
Hayai is under active development. App search and launch is the complete,
working vertical slice; file search, a calculator/unit conversion, clipboard
history, an action sub-menu, and a plugin system are planned but not yet
built. See AGENTS.md for architecture notes and known GPUI/Win32 pitfalls
if you're contributing.
This project specifically targets Windows (Win32 APIs for the hotkey, tray,
shell icon extraction, and packaged-app enumeration are used directly, no
cross-platform abstraction layer). It's built on GPUI
(the GUI framework behind the Zed editor) and
gpui-component for widgets,
chosen over Electron/web-view approaches specifically to keep the memory
footprint small — see AGENTS.md for the measured RSS numbers behind that
decision.
Issues and PRs welcome, but this is a side project and I may not have time to
review or merge promptly — contribute at your own risk. Please read
AGENTS.md first — it documents several non-obvious GPUI/Win32 pitfalls
(window lifecycle, focus ordering, thread discipline) that have already
caused shipped bugs once.