Getting Started

Quick Intro

Raycast is a fast, extendable launcher that’s designed to help you maximize your productivity and stay in flow. Out of the box, it comes with a collection of powerful tools that help you do more on your PC without context switching or lifting fingers from your keyboard. And with a growing ecosystem of third-party Extensions available in the Store, Raycast becomes even more powerful as your workflow evolves. You can personalize Raycast by adjusting Settings and assigning Shortcuts to your most-used applications and commands.

First Steps

After being invited to our private Windows Beta, you will be provided with a link to download Raycast. Once installed, we will take you through a few quick Onboarding steps that introduce our core features and let you select your global hotkey to launch it anytime.

When you open Raycast for the first time, here’s a few things you can try to get familiar:

1. Search for an application and launch it with the Enter key.
2. Try searching for files in root search, or in the Search Files command.
3. Enter any math expression in root search and copy the result with ↵. Check out some more examples of what our powerful Calculator can do.
4. Hit Tab from root search and start a conversation with Quick AI.
5. Open Clipboard History to browse through and take actions on your recently copied text, images, files, links, or colors.
6. Try our powerful Emoji Picker to quickly paste any emoji or symbol in your active app.
7. Browse our Store and install a few third-party Extensions.
8. Create a few Quicklinks to URLs and directories you open frequently.
9. Create a few Snippets of reusable text, organize them by tags, and try pasting them from Raycast the next time you need them.
10. Go to Raycast Settings using Ctrl , and assign Shortcuts to your most used Applications, Commands and Quicklinks. We recommend assigning Hotkeys and/or Aliases to core commands like Search Emoji & Symbols, Clipboard History, Search Files, as well as to any command (built-in or part of a third-party Extension) that you would like to access directly.
11. Join and engage with our Slack community to have a stake in our product roadmap.
12. Use the Send Feedback command to share ideas, feature requests, and bug reports.
13. Refer to all the pages in this manual to find detailed information about all currently available features, and how to maximize your usage of Raycast.