Raycast for Windows
raycast.com
raycast.com
- 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
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.
Not even if it's Everything? IMHO the best file search for Windows. Does one thing and does it perfectly.
While we don’t have all features on Windows yet, we see this a nice uplift.
And I forked Switcheroo to accommodate how I want Alt+Tab yo behave: https://github.com/coezbek/switcheroo
- 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
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)
F is not set as an alias by default tho
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
raycast.com/pricing
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.
Great piece of software and proud to advocate for its use on macOS to anyone willing to listen.
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.
Without knowing what you value about Alfred, there could be a million different things one could argue on.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
I don't want any AI at all, and I have turned down incredibly well-paid jobs because it would involve using Jira.
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.
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.
Kinda indistinguishable from "only runs on 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.
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.
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.
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 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".
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.
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).
I mean ways for the OS to lock up in ways that require a reboot. This is an objective criteria.
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.
I have some things that simply don't work anymore that kinda didn't bother me with easy workarounds on Win 10.
I would have to physically alter my desk setup for certain things with this new anti-feature. Not even sure how this could be argued as a win. (FWIW, I have 3 monitors and the bar used to be on the right one on top - so if I have a laptop half in front of it (no space next to the monitorr) I could do everything. open programs, look at the damn clock, etc.pp - now it's at the bottom and because of this annoying constraint called gravity I can't affix my laptop to be out of the way on top of the screen)
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.
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.
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.
Point is, if you're selling something to Windows users, don't say their choice of OS sucks.
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.
Though yeah, bit farfetched maybe but also somewhat fitting.