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⌘⇧Space, from any app

A Spotlight-class launcher that's actually file-manager-aware. Files, folders, snippets, calculator, clipboard history, web search. Optional AI-assist with your own model when you want to type what you mean instead of remembering exact names.

Space  — available system-wide. Seek lives in your menu bar so the hotkey works whether the main window's open or closed.

Seek launcher showing AI suggestion, recent folder, calculator result, app, clipboard entry, and web search row

Without AI

The launcher is fully useful before you connect a single API key. Everything below is deterministic — fuzzy-matched against your real recents, favourites, connections, and apps.

Recents · Favourites
Jump to any folder you've opened
Frecency-ranked. Type "down" → Downloads. Type "seek" → your seek repo. Path matches and word-start matches both score high enough to surface as the top hit.
Apps
Open any installed Mac app
Scans /Applications, ~/Applications, and /System/Applications. Type "chrome" → Google Chrome opens. No more digging through Launchpad.
Calculator
Inline arithmetic
12 * 30 / 751.428571. sqrt(144)12. 2 ^ 101024. ⏎ copies the result. Locale-aware formatting; no rounding surprises.
Clipboard history
Last 50 things you copied, searchable
Polled in-process — never leaves your machine. Type a substring of anything you've copied recently and re-paste it with one keystroke.
Web search
? sends to your search engine
?swift async stream opens DuckDuckGo (configurable). Bare URLs and hostnames open directly.
Connections
SFTP, S3, WebDAV, SMB
Saved cloud-drive and SSH connections appear inline — pick one, land on its file tree without opening the main window first.
Snippets
Templated text expansions
Triggers like /today and , , placeholders fill themselves in on Tab.
Spotlight blend
Real file results when you need them
200ms budget — the launcher's never blocked on slow disk searches, but real file hits appear when they're useful.

With AI (opt-in, read-only)

Turn it on if you want it. Skip it if you don't. Every Seek feature still works without an AI provider connected.

Local model — your machine, your data

Seek auto-detects Ollama on port 11434 and llama.cpp on port 8080. The model picker populates with whatever you have actually pulled — no hand-typing model ids.

  • No data leaves localhost
  • No API key required
  • No model bundled in the DMG (no 2 GB install bloat)
  • Works offline by definition

Or bring your own key

OpenAI-compatible (any /v1/chat/completions endpoint — vLLM, LiteLLM, OpenAI proper) or Anthropic. Stored in macOS Keychain, one slot per provider. Switch with the picker; the right key follows.

  • No proxy server in front of your traffic
  • No telemetry — Seek doesn't ping us when you use AI
  • Per-provider Keychain entries; never mixed
Read-only, by design. The AI can open, reveal, search, run a snippet, or open a saved connection. It can't delete, move, overwrite, or commit. Destructive verbs stay deterministic — you type the exact command. Even GPT-4 picks the wrong file 5–10% of the time; a 1B local model picks worse. Read-only is the safety floor that makes the feature shippable at all.

What it actually does: when you type "open the dotfiles repo" with AI on, the launcher poses your query plus a list of paths you've actually opened before to the model. The model picks one. If it tries to invent a path that's not in that list, the suggestion is rejected with a clear message — the model can't surface anything you haven't already touched.

The deterministic results still appear underneath the AI row. ↓ ⏎ at any time bypasses AI entirely.


How it compares

SpotlightRaycastAlfredSeek
Global hotkey
File-manager-aware (recents, favourites, connections)extensionsworkflows✓ built-in
Calculator + web search + clipboardpartial
AI assist with your local modelcloud-only✓ Ollama auto-detect
Account requiredPro tierPowerpacknever
TelemetryAppleRaycastnonenone
PriceFree + Pro $8/moFree + Powerpack £34Free, MIT
Seek doesn't try to replace Raycast for everyone — Raycast's extension catalogue is a different kind of product. We replace it for file-manager-shaped work, where Spotlight is too narrow and Raycast wants you to install a separate Pro plan or 12 extensions to do what Finder should already do natively.

Get it

Free, MIT-licensed, no account. The launcher is available the moment Seek is running — quit Seek and the hotkey detaches; relaunch and it's back.

Download Seek   Docs

An Ataiva product