u/Seagram62

Hey everyone,

I’ve been noticing a pretty clear shift in sentiment within the Mac community lately regarding the direction Raycast is taking—especially with the announcement and rollout of Raycast v2.

While Raycast has been the darlings of the macOS productivity space for a while now, it feels like the community is becoming increasingly divided. From what I’ve gathered across forums and threads, the criticism mainly boils down to three big points:

1. Moving Away from "Mac Native" (Web Tech / React UI)

The biggest source of backlash seems to be the architectural shift.

• Raycast gained its loyal following by being a lightning-fast, purely native Swift app built specifically for macOS.
• With v2, they’ve transitioned to a hybrid stack incorporating web views/React to facilitate cross-platform development.
• Mac purists are concerned this will lead to a loss of that snappy "Apple-native" feel, potential rendering delays, UI inconsistencies, and the overall soul of a true Mac app.

2. Shift in Focus Toward Windows / Cross-Platform

There’s a growing feeling among Mac users that macOS is taking a backseat.

A massive amount of engineering resources has gone into porting Raycast to Windows.

Many feel that macOS innovation slowed down over the past year simply because the team was bogged down rewriting the core architecture just to accommodate other operating systems.

3. RAM Usage and Performance

Even though the Raycast team claims they haven't built a bloated Electron app (it's a custom optimized stack), they have acknowledged that v2 uses more RAM than v1. For an app meant to sit quietly in the background as a lightweight Spotlight replacement, any increase in resource usage is a hard pill to swallow for power users.

Despite that, I’ve seen a noticeable number of long-time users talking about jumping ship back to Alfred or even sticking to Spotlight.

What are your thoughts? Have you noticed a hit in performance or battery life with v2, or do you think the backlash is blown out of proportion? Are you sticking around, or looking at alternatives?

Is it possible to link to a website within a Mermaid diagram? The code below doesn’t work. Or is there another way to do this?

flowchart TD
A[Google] → B[Wikipedia]

click A "https://www.google.com" "Google"
click B "https://www.wikipedia.org" "Wikipedia"

Is it also possible to link to another Bear note using a wikilink that includes a specific paragraph? For example, [[note#heading]].

Is there a way in the Raycast v2 beta to search for keywords within files (specifically PDFs)? Spotlight finds the files, but Raycast does not.

I originally assumed GlazeApp was building native Swift apps, since the promo videos make it look that way. But after checking the source, it looks like it’s actually an Electron app that uses the system WebView instead of bundling Chromium.

I do like how the team has customized React components to closely mimic native Swift controls, but under the hood it’s still a hybrid desktop app rendering a React UI through the system WebView.

Does that architecture limit whether you can publish a Glaze app on the Apple App Store, or make money from it?

The ability to view previews of PDF files, just like with JPG files in file search.

ik snap dat een bedrijf reclame maakt voor het werven van nieuwe klanten.

Maar zorg ervoor dat je bestaande klanten fatsoenlijk behandel. Ik wacht nog steeds op een e-mail welke gegevens nu echt van mij zijn gestolen bij de hack van begin februari. En dan bedoel ik niet het nietszeggende mailtje wat je hebt gekregen. Er zou nader onderzoek komen en zouden dit delen. We zijn vier maanden verder en nog steeds niets.

I get the feeling that Raycast v2 was introduced too quickly. I know it is a beta. But features that simply work in v1 are not yet present or do not work. Such as being able to adjust the font size in the windows. With a PDF file, you don't see a preview in the Raycast window. Higher memory usage. I get the impression that they are trying too hard to make the macOS and Windows versions look and develop them too similarly. To end on a positive note: searching for files is a big step forward.

After using Raycast as a Spotlight replacement for quite some time, I eventually ran into a number of frustrations. For me, the number of keystrokes required to perform even simple tasks often felt counterproductive rather than productivity-enhancing.

Some basic things, such as inserting a date in the Dutch format, were surprisingly difficult to achieve. Features like multi-level clipboard history and pasting workflows were either unavailable or unnecessarily cumbersome. While Raycast offers a huge number of extensions, most of them didn’t add much value to my particular workflow, which is heavily focused on genealogical research. Writing my own extensions was also beyond what I was willing or able to invest time in.

About two months ago, I decided to give Alfred a serious try, and I have to say: what a pleasure it has been. The learning curve came with a fair amount of trial and error, but creating simple workflows turned out to be much more accessible than I expected. The flexibility and customization options fit my way of working far better.

For my use case, Alfred has become an indispensable tool, and I honestly can’t see myself going back to Raycast.

The ability to use Dynamic Placeholders, Date {date} to enter the date used in the macOS language setting. So if your system is in Dutch, the date is filled in according to the Dutch format (e.g. 20 jun 2026)

I would like to see the option to enter the date according to the macOS setting using the placeholder {date} in V2. So that, in my case, the Dutch date is displayed as, for example, 15 jun 2026.