Raycast

Raycast replaces Spotlight. Press the hotkey, type, and it launches apps, does maths, converts units, searches files, pastes from a clipboard history, moves windows and runs your own scripts. On the surface it is a launcher. In practice it is the keyboard interface to the Mac that Apple never finished.

How I use it

Four things, many times a day. Clipboard history: anything I copied in the last weeks is a keystroke away, searchable, with images. I did not know I needed this until I had it, and now a Mac without it feels broken. Window management: half left, half right, maximise, next display, all from the keyboard, with no separate utility running. Snippets: a short trigger expands into a block of text, from my address to a boilerplate reply to a code template. And script commands: a folder of small shell and Python scripts, each with a comment header, each shows up as a command. Restart a local service, open today's log, clean a download folder. Things I used to do in a terminal with a cd first now take three letters.

A few extensions from the store round it out: one for a password manager, one for searching documentation, one for the calendar. I resisted the AI features for a while and still use them less than the basics; the basics are the product.

What surprised me is how little it asks. It is fast, it stays out of the way, and it has not once crashed on me.

What annoys me: the AI side is a subscription, and the pitch for it keeps getting louder in the app. The extension store has plenty of entries that stopped being maintained and quietly break. And it is easy to configure so many hotkeys that you forget half of them, which is a me problem the app does nothing to prevent.

Who it is for

Any Mac user who touches the keyboard more than the mouse. If Spotlight is enough for you and you have never wanted clipboard history, you can skip it. If you have ever written a script and wished it were a keystroke, install it today.