Written by Shahzaib Ali
Raycast App Review
I didn’t switch to Raycast because of a productivity blog. I switched because a developer I pair program with occasionally kept doing things on her Mac that I couldn’t figure out.
She’d be in the middle of explaining something, need to pull up a file, and it would just — appear. No Finder fumbling, no browser tab, no dock clicking. She’d be writing a message, need a color hex code, and it would materialize from thin air. She checked GitHub PR status without opening a browser. She started a timer without leaving her code editor.
“What are you doing?” I finally asked during one session.
“Raycast,” she said, like it was obvious.
I went home, downloaded it, opened it once, thought “this is just Spotlight with a different skin,” and left it in my Applications folder for three weeks without touching it. This is the part of the story most Raycast users have in common: the delayed click.
The click happened for me when I was searching for a file I’d worked on recently, couldn’t remember the exact name, and actually found it through Raycast’s file search faster than I’d found anything in Finder in recent memory. Then I looked up what else it could do and spent the next two hours going down a rabbit hole that reorganized how I work on a Mac.
This review is a year later. Here’s everything I’ve learned.
What You’re Actually Getting
Raycast replaces Spotlight — the Mac search bar that appears when you hit Command + Space. Install Raycast, set it to your preferred trigger (I use Option + Space, which doesn’t conflict with anything), and from that point forward it’s your single gateway for navigating your Mac and a lot of the tools you use.
The free tier covers launching apps, file search, clipboard history, window management, calculator, calendar event previews, color picker, Quicklinks, scripts, and the Extension Store with thousands of community-built integrations.
Raycast Pro at $8/month adds AI features — a sidebar AI assistant that can access your highlighted text in any app, multiple AI model choices including Claude and GPT-4, and custom AI commands.
That free tier is deceptively comprehensive. Most people who pay for Raycast Pro do so because the AI integration earns its cost. But you could use Raycast free forever and still be getting more than most productivity tools charge monthly for.
The First Real Month: Building Muscle Memory
The honest truth about Raycast is that it doesn’t feel transformative immediately. You open it, it searches for apps, you think “okay, this works.” The transformation happens when keyboard shortcuts become reflexive and the extensions start handling things you were doing manually.
The first habit I built was using Raycast for window management instead of dragging windows around with my mouse. Raycast has built-in window commands — type “left half” to snap a window to the left half of your screen, “maximize” to make it full screen, “top right quarter” to put it in the top right corner. These replace apps like Magnet or Rectangle for most use cases.
At first I had to consciously remember to use these. Three weeks in, I stopped thinking about it. Now reaching for my mouse to move a window feels archaic. That switch from conscious use to automatic use is the moment Raycast actually changes your workflow — and it happens at different speeds for different features.
The second habit was clipboard history. Enable this immediately when you install Raycast — go to Preferences → Extensions → Clipboard History and switch it on. Set the storage period to at least 30 days. From that point forward, everything you copy is searchable. Type a fragment of something you copied two weeks ago and it resurfaces. For anyone who copies and pastes across multiple apps and documents regularly, this becomes quietly essential within days.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been mid-project, realized I need something I copied earlier and didn’t save anywhere, opened Raycast, searched for a word I remembered from the content, and found it. Clipboard history sounds like a utility feature. In practice it’s changed how I treat information I encounter online — I copy things more freely because I know they’re retrievable.
The Extension Store: Where Things Get Seriously Useful
I want to spend real time here because this is the part of Raycast that separates it from every other launcher and that most surface-level reviews don’t adequately cover.
The Extension Store — access it by opening Raycast and typing “Store” — contains thousands of community-built extensions that connect Raycast to other apps and services. Not superficial connections. Genuinely functional integrations that let you interact with your tools without fully switching context.
Here’s what I mean in practice.
My GitHub extension means I can check PR status, search issues, open a specific repository, or review recent activity without opening a browser tab. When you’re in flow writing code or a document and need to check something in GitHub, the difference between “hit Option + Space, type the PR name, see status in Raycast preview pane” and “open browser, navigate to GitHub, find the PR” is the difference between a two-second interruption and a two-minute context break.
My Linear extension does the same for project issues. My Notion extension lets me search my entire workspace and open pages directly. My Spotify extension lets me skip tracks, search for songs, and control volume without touching the Spotify app.
None of this sounds world-changing in description. The cumulative effect of reducing these small friction points across a work day is legitimately noticeable after a few weeks — not in a “wow I’m so productive now” way, but in a quieter “I feel less interrupted” way that compounds over time.
The approach that actually works for getting value from extensions:
Open the Store, search for the three or four apps you use most heavily throughout your day — your project management tool, your code platform, your notes app, your communication tool. Install those extensions only. Spend a week just making those reflexive. Then add more. Installing everything at once produces a cluttered experience and makes nothing feel essential.
Quicklinks: The Five-Minute Setup That Pays for Itself Daily
Quicklinks are one of those Raycast features that seem minor in description and become daily habits almost immediately.
A Quicklink is a shortcut you create that opens a URL, optionally with a search term you type appended. You give it a short keyword trigger, and whenever you type that keyword in Raycast, it fires.
My current Quicklinks and what they do:
“gh [username/repo]” — opens that GitHub repository directly. So “gh vercel/next.js” opens github.com/vercel/next.js instantly.
“meet” — opens Google Meet directly to start a new meeting. I use this probably five times a day.
“cal” — opens my Google Calendar to today’s date.
“figma” — opens my team’s primary Figma workspace.
“docs [query]” — searches our internal documentation with whatever I type after it.
Setting up a Quicklink: open Raycast, type “Create Quicklink,” give it a name (what you’ll type to trigger it), enter the URL with {query} anywhere you want your typed search to be inserted, and you’re done. Thirty seconds per Quicklink. I have twelve of them and use at least eight daily.
Raycast AI: What’s Actually Worth the $8/Month
I was skeptical of the Pro tier for the first four months I used Raycast. The free tier felt complete enough that I couldn’t justify a subscription for a launcher.
What changed my mind: I started using the AI command feature properly instead of just poking at it.
The key insight is that Raycast AI is most valuable not as a chatbot replacement, but as text manipulation available anywhere on your Mac. Here’s what I mean.
I can highlight any text in any application — email, document, code file, notes app, it doesn’t matter — and trigger a Raycast AI command on it with a keyboard shortcut. The text gets processed and the result comes back, usually as clipboard content I can paste, without me opening a browser, switching to an AI chat window, or breaking my flow.
The commands I use daily:
- Improve Writing on draft emails and documents before sending
- Fix Spelling and Grammar on quick messages I’ve typed fast
- Explain Code on functions I’m trying to understand
- Summarize on long text I need to distill quickly
- Translate on content I encounter in other languages
I also created custom AI commands for things specific to my work — one that rewrites text in a more formal register for certain client communications, one that converts bullet points into a coherent paragraph, one that extracts action items from a block of meeting notes.
The model selection matters. For editing and writing work, I use Claude because it handles stylistic nuance better for my purposes. For code explanation, GPT-4 gives me answers I find more actionable. You can set a default and override per command.
At $8/month, if you use any of these text operations more than a few times a day, the math is favorable. If you’d primarily use Raycast as a launcher with extensions, stay free.
The Built-In Tools That Killed My Other Utility Apps
This section is slightly annoying to write because it involves admitting I paid for things I no longer needed.
Window management: I ran Magnet ($4.99) for two years. Raycast’s built-in window commands replace it completely for my use case. If you use Magnet or Rectangle, try uninstalling them after a week with Raycast.
Color picker: I had a little menubar color picker utility I’d forgotten where I’d even downloaded it from. Raycast has a Color Picker command that samples any color on screen in hex, RGB, HSL, or other formats. Gone.
Timer/focus tools: I used a separate Pomodoro app. Raycast’s built-in Timer command (“timer 25 minutes”) does this from the keyboard without opening anything. I still use dedicated focus apps for session logging, but for the timer itself, Raycast handles it.
Calculator: This one sounds obvious, but Raycast’s calculator (just type math directly into the search bar) handles currency conversion, unit conversion, and percentage calculations that Spotlight’s calculator doesn’t. “15% of 340” works. “150 USD to EUR” works.
The Things That Genuinely Frustrated Me
macOS exclusive. I use a MacBook as my primary machine, so this doesn’t personally cost me, but if your workflow involves Windows machines or Linux, Raycast’s value disappears entirely when you step away from your Mac.
Extension quality is uneven. Community-built extensions range from excellent and actively maintained to abandoned and slightly broken. Before building an important workflow around an extension, check the Store for when it was last updated. I’ve had a couple of extensions develop minor bugs after macOS updates that weren’t fixed quickly because the developer had moved on.
It doesn’t replace everything. Some Alfred power users will find that highly complex workflow automation they’ve built in Alfred over years doesn’t translate cleanly to Raycast’s extension and script system. Raycast scripts can do a lot, but the Alfred workflow builder has a depth that Raycast doesn’t match for sophisticated automation use cases.
The learning curve is real. I said this earlier and I’ll say it again: someone who downloads Raycast, opens it a few times without customizing it, and concludes it’s “just Spotlight but prettier” is not wrong about their specific experience. The payoff is proportional to the setup. If you’re not willing to spend a couple of weekends learning shortcuts, installing extensions, and setting up Quicklinks, you’ll get marginal value and reasonably conclude the hype is overblown.
How to Actually Get Started (The Right Way)
Day one: Install Raycast, set your trigger shortcut in Preferences → General, enable Clipboard History in Preferences → Extensions. Do nothing else. Just use it for a week for app launching and see how it feels.
Week two: Go to the Store and install extensions for the two or three tools you use most heavily. Spend the week making those reflexive.
Week three: Set up five to ten Quicklinks for your most-visited URLs and internal tools. Start using built-in tools (Window Management, Color Picker, Calculator) for things you were using other apps for.
Week four onward: Create keyboard shortcuts for your most-used commands in Preferences → Extensions. Consider the Pro trial if you do significant writing or text work. Build custom scripts for anything repetitive that isn’t covered by existing extensions.
This sequence takes a month but produces a genuinely different Mac experience by the end of it.
A year in, Raycast is the Mac app I’d most resist having taken away from me. Not because it does anything magic, but because it’s removed enough small friction points from my daily workflow that working without it now feels slower in a way that’s hard to fully articulate to someone who hasn’t used it.
The developer who introduced me to it, by the way, has since moved to a new company. I thanked her at some point for the recommendation. She seemed mildly surprised I’d remembered.