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Raycast is the launcher I now reach for dozens of times a day, all from a single option + space shortcut. That one menu handles clipboard history, window management, app launching, a calculator, and a lot more.

Coming from Windows

I switched to macOS from a Windows background, and at first I kept missing little things that were second nature to me before. So I went looking for ways to fix that, and Raycast turned out to be the answer to almost all of it.

I got it for two reasons at first: window management and clipboard history.

  • Window management. Coming from Windows I could not get used to how macOS handles windows. I configured control + command + left/right to cycle a window through half-screen positions, which is the snapping behaviour I was missing.
  • Clipboard history. Inspired by the Windows clipboard history, but actually much more powerful: a better search menu, and the history is preserved across laptop restarts.

Later I found it does a lot more than that.

What Raycast is

At its core Raycast is an action menu. You open it with a shortcut and from there you can launch and run apps, paste from clipboard history, manage windows, do quick calculations, and more. On top of that there is a plugin ecosystem that extends it further: a color picker, Spotify controls, a kill process command, and plenty of others.

A few things I lean on every day:

  • Calculator. Powerful inline math right in the menu, no separate app needed.
  • Color picker. I used this one to pull colors out of a photo when building my personal palette.
  • App and file search. Fast, fuzzy, and it just finds what I am looking for.
  • Kill process. Killing a stuck application was not trivial on macOS at first, so Raycast's task-manager-style kill is great.
  • Volume control. I bound volume up/down to control + shift + arrow up/down.

In my opinion this option + space menu beats the default command + space Spotlight by a wide margin.

Raycast used to be Mac-only, but it is now available on Windows too.

Why I recommend it

I think Raycast is awesome and would advise anyone to give it a try. Small optimizations to daily tasks add up fast, because these are tiny actions you repeat all day long. Shave a second off something you do a hundred times and it quietly becomes one of the best changes to your workflow.