One keystroke.A Mac launcherthat gets outof your way.
Apps, your clipboard, math, currency, screenshots — and the Launchpad grid macOS 26 deleted. A real Mac app that opens instantly and works with no internet connection, not a browser tab in a window.
What macOS 26 removed, and what your other apps still charge for
Raycast Pro is $8 a month, $96 a year, every year, for as long as you keep using it. Coco's list price is $99 once for one Mac, and the launch price is $49 — about half of one year of Raycast Pro, and then nothing again. Buy it once and there is no renewal, no seat that expires under you, and no account required until the moment you buy.
macOS 26 deleted Launchpad, the full-screen grid of every app you own, and put an alphabetical list inside Spotlight in its place. Coco draws that grid again — the same pages, the same folders, the same pinch — because Apple removing a feature is not the same thing as you no longer wanting it.
Type wx and 微信 answers. Type memo and メモ answers. Coco matches on pinyin, romaji and Korean jamo as well as English, so the app whose name you cannot type in English still opens on the first try — no other launcher on this page does that.
What it does, in more than four words
Launching and switching
Press the hotkey, type, hit return. Matching runs on names, abbreviations, pinyin, romaji and Korean jamo, so 微信 answers to wx and メモ answers to memo. What you open often rises on its own, ranked by how much you actually use it rather than alphabetically. Every result also carries actions — reveal in Finder, copy the path, quit, force quit — so the launcher is also the quickest way to deal with an app you did not want running.
Clipboard history
Every copy is kept and searchable, images as well as text. Press space on a result for a large preview, which is the difference between pasting the right screenshot and pasting the one next to it. Pin the things you paste constantly — an address, a licence key, a snippet — so they stop scrolling away. By default it lives in your own iCloud Drive, so it follows you between your Macs — your iCloud, not a Coco server — and a switch in settings keeps it on this machine only. Worth knowing either way, for a feature that by definition sees everything you copy.
Calculator, units and live currency
Type an expression and the answer is in the panel before you finish it. Unit conversion works the same way. Currency uses live rates with a small chart of where that rate has been, so 120 usd to jpy is one keystroke and a glance instead of a browser tab and a cookie banner. Rates are cached, so the everyday conversions still answer instantly when you are on a plane.
The Launchpad grid
The full-screen grid macOS 26 removed: pages you arrange yourself, folders built by dropping one icon onto another, opened with a four- or five-finger pinch, a hot corner, or a hotkey. Your arrangement lives in Coco’s own file rather than the system database Tahoe deleted, so a future OS update cannot wipe it. It has a page of its own, because for a lot of people it is the only reason they are here.
Screenshots and live captions
Capture and annotate without adding a second icon to the menu bar, and transcribe audio into live captions as it plays. Both are things people usually install a separate app for. Here they live in the one app you already keep running, which is the point of having a launcher at all.
Plugins, and your Raycast extensions
Coco runs third-party JavaScript plugins with bridges to the filesystem, HTTP, the shell, images and system APIs, installed from the Coco Store in one keystroke. It can also read a local copy of the Raycast extensions repo, scan the source, and tell you which ones will actually run under it. We published the whole scan, run with Coco’s own rules rather than a guess: of 3,232 extensions, 79 run out of the box. Switch on the experimental declarative Raycast UI in Settings and that becomes 815. The rest are blocked on something specific — network access, privileged Node modules, AppleScript, a menu-bar presence — and the catalogue says which, per extension.
Your AI agent can drive Coco
See what agents can do →- No dialogs to click through — it runs the command and moves on.
- Everything Coco does is reachable: clipboard, screenshots, search, plugins.
- Your secrets stay private — the agent calls Coco, not the other way around.
Copy the prompt, or send it straight to the AI you already use — it drives Coco through the same commands you would type yourself.
Install the Coco skill (npx skills add butterflydream-ai/Coco --skill coco -g -y), then use coco to paste what I just copied into Notes.Coco next to Spotlight, Raycast and Alfred
Every Mac launcher worth naming does the same core thing well, so the honest comparison is about what each one adds around it. Spotlight is already installed and indexes your files better than anything else here — if that is all you need, use it and stop reading. Raycast has the deepest extension ecosystem, rented at $8 a month. Alfred has twenty years of workflows and the most loyal users on this list, bought once. None of them draws an app grid or matches an app name typed in pinyin, romaji or Korean jamo, and only Coco is a one-time purchase with no account.
So: if you want a launcher with an app store attached and do not mind a subscription, Raycast. If you have Alfred workflows, keep Alfred. If you mostly want Spotlight to be faster, Spotlight is free and you should try it first. Coco is for the case where you want one hotkey to cover apps, clipboard, math, currency, capture and captions — and you want the Launchpad grid back — without renting any of it.
| Coco | Spotlight | Raycast | Alfred | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| App search | ||||
| File and document search | ||||
| Launchpad-style app grid | ||||
| Clipboard history | Powerpack | |||
| Currency conversion | Workflow | |||
| Rate history chart | ||||
| Screenshot and annotation | ||||
| Live captions | ||||
| Third-party plugins | ||||
| Pinyin, romaji and jamo matching | Partial | |||
| Works with no network | Mostly | |||
| Price | List $99, launch $49 | Included | Free or $8/mo | £34 once |
Getting started
Download and open it once
Drag Coco to Applications and open it. It reads what you have installed, asks for the permissions it actually needs, and picks a hotkey — you can change it. There is no account and no card; the seven-day trial starts because the app is running, not because you signed up for anything.
Put it on the hotkey your hands already know
Most people map it over Spotlight. If you would rather keep both, give Coco a different chord and use them side by side for a week — whichever one you reach for without thinking is the one to keep.
Bring your setup with you
If you have a local copy of the Raycast extensions repo, point Coco at it: it scans the source and imports the commands that will run, and tells you plainly why the rest will not. Coco Store plugins install in one keystroke from inside the panel.
Arrange the grid once
Open the Launchpad grid, drag icons into the order you want, drop one onto another to make folders, and push what you rarely open to the last page. This is the only step that takes real time, and you do it once.
Questions people actually ask
- What makes this different from Spotlight?
- Spotlight is very good at finding files and is already on your Mac, so if that is all you need, you do not need Coco. What surrounds the search box is where the difference sits. A clipboard history that keeps every copy, a calculator and live currency that answer inside the panel, screenshot capture with annotation. Live captions, third-party plugins, plus the full-screen app grid macOS 26 removed. Coco also matches on pinyin, romaji and Korean jamo, which matters a great deal if your apps are not all named in English.
- Is it a subscription?
- No. Seven days free with no card and no account, then a one-time purchase: list price $99 for one Mac, launch price $49. There is no renewal and no seat that expires under you, and the app keeps working offline with no periodic check-in, which is the part subscriptions quietly take away. Updates within this major version are included, there is a 14-day refund with no questions asked, and you can move the licence to a new Mac yourself without asking us.
- Does it work offline?
- Yes, and this is a design constraint rather than a happy accident. The panel, app launching, clipboard history, the calculator, unit conversion, the Launchpad grid and installed plugins are all local and need no network at all. Currency conversion caches its rates, so everyday conversions still answer instantly on a plane; only fetching a fresh rate needs a connection. Nothing you type into the panel is sent anywhere, and there is no license check-in that can strand you.
- Can I use my Raycast extensions?
- Some of them, and Coco tells you which before you install anything. It reads a local copy of the Raycast extensions repository, scans each command's source, and reports what will run under its runtime. Of the 3,232 extensions we scanned, 79 run the moment you install Coco. Turning on the experimental declarative Raycast UI in Settings raises that to 815 — that tier is Coco’s own native renderer for a command’s List, Detail and Form screens, and it ships off because it executes third-party code. The remainder are blocked on network access, privileged Node modules, AppleScript, OAuth or a menu-bar presence. The full catalogue is published on this site, per extension, with the reason.
- What is it not good at yet?
- There is no window management and no native text expander; both are on the list and neither is pretended otherwise anywhere on this site. The Raycast import covers commands, not the whole extension ecosystem, and it will never cover extensions that need the network or a menu-bar UI. It is Apple Silicon only, macOS 14 and later. If any of those is the thing you were shopping for, one of the other launchers is a better answer today.