I'm not sure I see the benefit of this over PowerToys beyond system-wide indexing for file search (which I'd want in Explorer, not a separate launcher app). Let alone the premium tiers.
- AI? What's the benefit beyond agents in more domain-specific environments (or gen-purpose site) vs native to a launcher app?
- Custom window management is available with PowerToys
- Unlimited clipboard history - I'm not sure I want or need this over PowerToys retaining it for system uptime.
- (Free?) Extension library looks a step beyond what's currently available for PowerToys' Command Palette, but will Raycast gain more Windows-focused extensions faster than Command Palette does?
Competition is good, but I don't see how this adds value as a premium service beyond PowerToys
Ditto is the best tool for clipboard history I've found. One of my first installs on any Windows machine.
I agree with you on PowerToys - that's also a first install. Raycast is really PowerToys for Mac... But now on Windows, perhaps for the people that started on Mac and have to use Windows, rather than the other way around.
> which I'd want in Explorer, not a separate launcher app
Not even if it's Everything? IMHO the best file search for Windows. Does one thing and does it perfectly.
We already have hundreds of extensions to integrate with Notion, GitHub, Slack and many other services. They all work on Windows as well. A whole community builds those extensions. And there is pretty much something new every day.
While we don’t have all features on Windows yet, we see this a nice uplift.
I am happy with Listary (ancient version) for file-search.
And I forked Switcheroo to accommodate how I want Alt+Tab yo behave: https://github.com/coezbek/switcheroo
I'm currently trying both Raycast windows (beta) and Flow Launcher. I've never really used this kind of launcher before (just the highly frustrating Windows main search feature).
- Raycast has a nice UI that can expand to work well with extensions
- Flow is faster to use. With Raycast you often need to enter an extension to finish your action. To launch a scrip on Flow I just type "r [shortcut] -> enter" while Raycast is "quicklinks -> enter -> [shortcut] -> enter. [edit, with minimal setup using aliases, you can have similar speed. See __jonas comment below]
- Performance-wise, Raycast was often eating my RAM, but a dev mentioned it's expected in the beta, they'll fix it for the launch. Otherwise, both feel snappy
- Both seem to have enough community support and extensions
- I never really tried the AI features, I don't know if it's the right place for me to augment my workflow w/ it
Curious about the experience of others with these tools or similar ones
> Flow is faster to use. With Raycast you often need to enter an extension to finish your action. To launch a scrip on Flow I just type "r [shortcut] -> enter" while Raycast is "quicklinks -> enter -> [shortcut] -> enter
That’s surprising to me, since it’s not how it works in the mac version of Raycast.
There you just type the extension name to trigger it, which you can also set an alias for, so I have it set so that if I type “c” then press space I see my list of vscode projects which I can search. “f” goes into file search (I think that’s the default even)
Good point, turns out I was using aliases wrong! It works with spacebar and makes it as easy to use as flow once you set it up.
F is not set as an alias by default tho
Have you tried Everything by Voidtools? I’m curious how these tools compare with that. I like how fast and simple it is.
Nope, sorry. My main use case is app launch, finding settings, and some scripts. I don't use file search that much.
Small point for Flow here again, because you just have to use the prefix doc: to search through your files, whereas on Raycast, you need to set up an alias and enter the extension. Both have file preview
I'm wondering why does it cost $8..16 per month if I run it locally? What are the costs of having me as a customer justifying the subscription price?
Most stuff is for free exactly for the reasons you mentioned.
raycast.com/pricing
But what is the associated cost of having "Unlimited Clipboard History" which justifies $8/m?
The cost is 8/m of profit that wouldn’t show up on the balance sheet
Assumedly it's the AI stuff that comes with it, and features are arbitrarily sectioned off.
The biggest feature that was missing when I was testing the closed beta was Window Management! Hope that made / makes it into this version of the app soon.
Great piece of software and proud to advocate for its use on macOS to anyone willing to listen.
Alfred (https://www.alfredapp.com/) has been an indispensable part of my computing since it debuted. It's excellent.
Because of that, I've found it difficult to even give Raycast a try, let alone switch over to it.
Perhaps you could offer your best argument to persuade me why it would be worthwhile.
Give it a test drive. I've been a past Alfred user, and I think Raycast is better on pretty much every metric.
Without knowing what you value about Alfred, there could be a million different things one could argue on.
We have basic window management now available like Left Half, Center, and so on. More to come!
But doesn't Powertoys already include something like this for free?
The beta for Window is free. And well even on Mac most features are free: raycast.com/pricing
Hooray! Finally someone is trying to bring paid subscriptions, AI slop, and proprietary ripoffs of popular FOSS tools to Windows. Why didn't Microsoft ever think of this?
Raycast was too expensive. Dumped it for Alfred. Took a few weeks, but I'm happy.
Have used Alfred for 10+ years at this point. Some colleagues are hyped about Raycast, but to me the pricing model is a joke. Pay (monthly) for AI - how about I bring my own API key? Pay (again, monthly) for unlimited clipboard history - lol. Free plan, "Free, forever". Yeah, until it isn't.
Alfred isn't the shiniest thing anymore but it's stood the time remarkably well, something I value very highly for tools as central to my workflow as Alfred.
You can use bring you own key for free
Awesome if that's the case
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feel like it's still not as smooth as powertoys
Finder for Windows.
so it's like Keypirinha but with AI?
A little bit irrelevant, but as a Mac user I couldn't prevent Raycast from phoning home even though I disabled AI, telemetry etc. Finally I blocked all connections from Little Snitch.
As a tool I think it's superior to Spotlight, but I still have concerns about privacy, specifically why their developers think that it's okay to send requests without user's knowledge.
For the Linux users, there is Vicinae, which is mostly API compatible with the Raycast API. https://github.com/vicinaehq/vicinae https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45188116
Why can Mac developers absolutely never resist making dated Win9x / Windows XP / BSOD references every time they make a port of their software to Windows? Zed did the same thing recently and it was just as overplayed.
Developers please, when you do this, you are telling your audience, the people you want to pay you money for your work, "Yeah, we think you suck, but here's some thing we finally got around to porting over" - why would you do that?
I agree this is in poor taste. It feels a little insulting -- and I get why they didn't think that, but, I can read that into it, a 'you're still using Windows, never getting yourself out of that rut' sort of vibe.
I think people who do this think that people who use Windows perceive that the Mac experience is smoother, and may have some sort of Mac envy.
The end of the video gives this away: it's the Think Different font. It's a direct callback to the _idea_ of Apple vs Microsoft, not the reality today of Apple vs Microsoft.
I know many devs who use Windows exclusively, but they are in two camps:
a) Super old-school: still maintaining Windows desktop apps; that's what their career has been and there's no need for anything else.
b) WSL-based, VSCode-using devs who are one step away from just using Linux. These are the folk who fifteen years ago would have been using what was then still OSX. But these folk don't use Windows as Windows: they use it as a semi-Unix.
>I think people who do this think that people who use Windows perceive that the Mac experience is smoother, and may have some sort of Mac envy.
There's an irony in this due to this:
>b) WSL-based, VSCode-using devs who are one step away from just using Linux. These are the folk who fifteen years ago would have been using what was then still OSX. But these folk don't use Windows as Windows: they use it as a semi-Unix.
The people still doing the "hurr durr wind0ze suxx" routine are the ones stuck 15 years in the past. Modern Windows is an entirely different and vastly more capable beast and it still runs huge swathes of the enterprise world.
The best technologists I know don't really care all that much which desktop platform you stick them on anymore since most of what they really need is either available everywhere or running on a backend that isn't their desktop anyway.
> Modern Windows is an entirely different and vastly more capable beast and it still runs huge swathes of the enterprise world.
Okay, but what does it actually do that Linux doesn't? What's the selling point, why should I make the switch from Linux to Windows?
For one, it can run Raycast. There are launchers on Linux that implement a small fraction of Raycast's functionality, but entire categories of abilities are only possible in Raycast, like CRUD operations on Jira tickets, using AI to interact with your Notion workspace without having to pay Notion 20 USD per month, and directly interacting with other remote APIs with just a few keystrokes.
Okay, but why would I want that?
I don't want any AI at all, and I have turned down incredibly well-paid jobs because it would involve using Jira.
c) Those of us who've been using Linux for a decade, but are forced to use Windows in our day job because of MS Office/Proprietary VPN client that only runs on Windows/other program that doesn't run well on Linux.
> Proprietary VPN client that only runs on Windows
Out of curiosity, which one? I haven’t encountered a single-platform VPN client in years. Even Microsoft’s built in VPN client is just standards-compliant and interoperable IKEv2.
I think if all you want is a Unix, you're better off with Mac, or at least you would have been before the Apple Silicon transition broke Windows support, and Valve stopped supporting Proton on Mac, and CrossOver still doesn't support Unreal Engine, etc.
Stuff like games and proprietary drivers is what keeps people on Windows, I think. Either that, or just a distate for the Mac's design language / user experience, which is also completely fair.
Back in 2016 or so, I had a triple-boot on my MacBook Pro:
- macOS for daily driving, and most development
- Windows for Windows-specific development, gaming, and proprietary drivers or IDEs (Texas Instruments programmers; Samsung / OnePlus flashing; some other embedded tooling)
- Arch Linux for Linux-specific development, usually involving the GPU, which I couldn't get to work in a VM; and also just for fun
These days I simply cannot do most of those things with Mac hardware. I can't even run Asahi yet, because M4 Max.
I play World of Warcraft on my M1 Mac, and my wife plays it on her M4. It's native on Apple Silicon and runs like a dream. So, much like Linux, gaming on a Mac is totally possible depending on which games you want to play. We only play World of Warcraft and were able to dump our Windows machines completely.
The selection of games for macOS is tiny compared to Windows, and even Linux now due to proton. For example Paradox games used to have decent support with macOS, but now Europa Universalis V is Windows only (but works with proton) so I can't currently play it.
That's great that you play a game that has a Mac port! I play at least TerraTech Worlds, Volcanoids, Space Engineers, Stationeers, BeamNG.drive, Avorion, Deep Rock Galactic, Dishonored, Cogmind, Pacific Drive, Risk of Rain 2, Just Cause 3/4, Scrap Mechanic ... all of which don't/won't have Mac ports and many of which won't run in CrossOver. Recently I've been getting into ARC Raiders too which definitely won't ever have a Mac port. But it's great that you don't have that problem.
I also played Baldur's Gate 3!
I have my fair share of games that run on Mac too, for example I was really happy to learn about No Man's Sky on Mac because I was really into that for a while. It's just not very common, so I simply can't play most games without keeping a Windows desktop around.
I think you're being oversensitive, especially in the context Raycast adding support for Windows.
The whole purpose of Raycast is to improve productivity and UX, be that under macOS or Windows. It'd be a pretty shitty launch announcement if the blog post didn't mention the problem that they're trying to solve.
Edit: I'm not sure if the post was edited after my reply, but ATM there's no mention of BSODs - the closest I can see to a dig at Windows is:
> You know the feeling. Search that can't find your files. Apps buried in menus. Simple tasks that take too many clicks. Your computer should be faster than this. It should feel like everything is at your fingertips. That’s why we built Raycast.
That's certainly what the app itself does (I'm even using it myself!), but I just don't understand why they couldn't resist putting in these overused digs.
Fair and point taken. If you want to know a bit more about the video, we shared a bit more here: https://x.com/peduarte/status/1991510075505070260
On some level I understand. These products are solutions, implying that there exist problems that they're thus solving. How they go about presenting these is a matter of taste, and apparently this is just the taste these people tend to have.
Windows had a good run from Windows 2000/XP-ish [1] to Windows 7, maybe 8.1. Any tech person who lived through the 90ies knows that 95/98/ME was a tire fire. With Windows 10 and 11 the enshittification started in a big way and it became a vehicle for analytics, pushing ads and Microsoft stuff, and now forcing their on AI on users.
All the ridicule is well-deserved IMO. There is an alternate universe where Microsoft would have continued Windows in the 2000/XP/7 tradition and it would be a solid operating system, serving the user, underpinned by a very good foundation (after all, the original NT people were stellar engineers that worked on VMS before).
[1] Earlier NT versions were also quite good, but most consumers didn't encounter it.
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Yeah. This is generally the type of thing that turns me off to working in the Linux/MacOS world. It's just a near constant "We're living in the 90s" attitude towards everything Microsoft does or has done. It's just absolutely insufferable.
I know more about both Windows AND Linux than most Linux Systems Administrators that I encounter. I know more about how making them work together in an enterprise than any Linux Administrator. I understand more about literally every underlying protocol AND how to manage those items on Linux and Windows, from DHCP, DNS, Networking, etc.
For all intents, I could be a pretty bad ass "Linux guru"--and for the most part, I hold my own quite well. I know how to manage SSSD, understand integrating Linux and Windows environments into harmony with each other. But my peers often see something in Windows they dislike, or a single thing that Microsoft hasn't really bothered to improve, and holy fuck in their minds the sky is falling and it's the absolutely worse thing they've ever had to do with a computer.
So I keep one foot outside of that world because these people are just fucking insufferable to work with and around.
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Exactly, at least dunk on something relevant in 2025, otherwise you come over as someone out of touch.
It's "we think windows sucks"
And they are right.
The enshittification of windows is by far the most egregious example in modern software.
Windows is disgusting. The start menu is disgusting. The bloat, slowness, lack of design cohesion and flakiness has real consequences.
Its not "you suck" it's "windows used to be better" and to me it seems objectively true that it used to be better
Windows used to require a reboot to change an IP address.
Windows used to BSOD when the graphics stack crashed.
Used to come without a built-in firewall exposing all sorts of vulnerabilities to the public Internet.
Used to not isolate critical kernel components to 3rd party software.
(And Windows has always had a hodge-poge of UI designs dating back to NT4/Win95 which contained Win3.x design elements)
The list can go on about how it most certainly, objectively, was not "better".
The Windows kernel has certainly improved—BSODs are now rare—but the userspace has only gotten worse. The end result is a decline in usability and dozens of new ways for your OS to enter a permanently unusable state without a BSOD.
There are gains and losses in UX, I agree. I avoid the ads stuff via Pro (though not completely the telemetry, that said it's for games and a separate Enterprise device for Windows-only PoSh). I think the big spot for 'Recent' on the start menu, which I disable recent, is a waste of space.
But I don't use the start menu in the way of Windows' past; it's always Win+type what I want.
We did gain with things like tabbed Explorer or a right-click menu not infested by COM extensions taking ages to load.
I'm not aware of any of these 'dozens of new ways' to make Windows unusable in the way I use it, then again Windows doesn't really force any one happy path, there are often five different ways to do one thing.
That’s just your opinion, man.
Like, what do you mean by “permanently unusable state?”
This is all just vague nonsense.
Windows bad because Microsoft, or something.
I’m gonna guess you’ll come back and say something dated or exaggerated like “OneDrive nags you all the time” (nope, it can be fully uninstalled in windows 11 just like any app).
> That’s just your opinion, man. > Like, what do you mean by “permanently unusable state?”
I mean ways for the OS to lock up in ways that require a reboot. This is an objective criteria.
Sounds like you don’t know what the word “permanent” means. If you can reboot and everything works again that doesn’t sound all that permanent.
I use all three major OSes regularly and none of them lock up in ways that require a reboot with any level of regularity, never mind entering a “permanently unusable state.”
In my experience I find that at present in 2025, rebooting Apple systems seems to fix occasional little wonky problems [1], my Linux laptop needs reboots or hard restarts for occasional sleep issues, and my Windows 11 desktop’s most frequent problem tends to be graphics driver crashes while playing games (and that’s partially my fault for choosing AMD instead of Nvidia). That is the kind of problem that used to cause full system lock-ups but Windows 11 actually manages that failure relatively gracefully.
But the point is that the only operating system I interact with that never has any issues on the OS level are my Linux servers, but that’s really an entirely different use case with much less complexity and risk than a desktop workstation. And even then it’s common practice to manage Linux servers as cattle rather than pets and just destroy/replace them when there’s an issue.
[1] Out of all the desktop operating systems, I think Apple has the highest quantity of hastily added features that ship with rarely-fixed minor bugs, while the Windows team doesn’t even attempt to add features at anything close to Apple’s pace. macOS has this struggle to keep feature parity with iOS and the iPhone which itself has a economic mandate to iterate quickly. For example, since iOS 26 I’ve been having random issues with Guided Access and the screenshot tool on iOS that only resolve when I restart the phone. I’ve also needed to cycle Bluetooth since iOS 26 on occasion to get my AirPods to connect successfully.
Try telling these reasons to your aging father who no longer understands how to print a file the government sent him because windows has changed windows explorer so much that he doesn't even understand that it's part of the OS anymore.
The disaster that is the ever shifting UX of windows is having serious harm on our senior citizens.
I've fielded several issues like this from many different seniors I know.
We've left these people behind and it's a shame that is having serious consequences.
Yes, things are better under the hood. But the surface, the UX, is a mark of shame on our entire industry.
This is a strange take. Should we never ever change UI because grandpa can’t learn the updates?
This is reductive black and white thinking that simply refuses to deal with the real problem that I clearly illustrated.
Microsoft windows is a critical tool that society continues to build dependence on. The poorly executed redesigns of key windows features has consequences unlike the vast majority of software systems.
With Microsofts great power, comes great responsibility.
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Nah man. Windows 10 and on are hot garbage and everyone knows it.
XP was the golden age and this is just a play on nostalgia to when Windows was actually useful.
I’ve been off of Windows for a few years now and any time I need to use a Windows system it’s just a constant reminder of how terrible everything is.
I feel the same way about macOS, I used it for several years for various jobs and now will literally not accept a job offer if they force another Macbook on me.
Point is, if you're selling something to Windows users, don't say their choice of OS sucks.
Same tbh. macOS is my last resort, I find so much of it incredibly frustrating, from the literal constant permission nannying, the unrepentant "We broke your shit, deal with it" that comes with many many updates, the horrendous UI of Tahoe, it's the worst. Apple might have great (though boring) laptop hardware, but jeez louise does macOS ruin the whole thing.
I had so many issues with it, but the one that annoyed me the most is app icons in the menu bar being hidden behind the physical notch, meaning I couldn't see them unless I was connected to a second screen. It showed me the whole "Apple is amazing at design" stereotype was just that.
Oh, and the Music app would launch whenever I hit the play key, even with Spotify open in a tab. Not once did I ever want to open Music.
I used to be a diehard Mac guy but now I insist on having a Linux workstation. My preference is Suse but I’d settle for Ubuntu if it means I don’t have to use MacOS.
Raycast is built using Rust. So the rust toxicity has to be there in their community
Non-sequitur
Why would you call it Raycast? Does cast rays in any way?
It’s a bit of a metaphor. It’s one app to control all your tools. A bit part of that is searching. So the app “casts rays” to find content.
Though yeah, bit farfetched maybe but also somewhat fitting.
I assumed it was something to do with ray tracing or video casting (Miracast, Chromecast).