Show HN: A Raycast-compatible launcher for Linux

ByteAtATime · 2025-07-13T16:57:48.000Z

Hey HN!I'm a huge fan of Raycast, but as a Linux user, I was always disappointed it wasn't available on my main OS. This summer, I decided to just build it myself. This project has the goal of being interoperable with Raycast itself, including a majority of the extensions.It's built with Tauri and Rust on the backend, with a Svelte frontend. The biggest challenge was getting it to run existing Raycast extensions, which required building a custom React renderer as well as making a custom API.I also wrote a quick post, which I hope to expand on in the future, about this project. You can find it here: https://byteatatime.dev/posts/recreating-raycastThe project is still very rough, but I'm sharing it now to get any feedback you may have!

runjake 311 days ago |

Looks great! Change the name. The Raycast people are going to (initially) ask you to anyway.

Raycast also runs on Windows now, albeit in beta.

Other Linux launchers with extensibility:

KRunner: https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/Krunner

Albert: https://albertlauncher.github.io/

WD-42 311 days ago | |

There is also rofi, wofi, fuzzl, dmenu, and even gnome search providers. No shortage of launchers on Linux, all with varying capabilities.

ksynwa 311 days ago |

From wikipedia

> Raycast is an application launcher and productivity software developed for macOS and by Raycast Technologies Ltd. It offers fast access to applications, dictionaries, files, text snippets, clipboard, and more.[2] Raycast is an alternative to the macOS's built-in Spotlight function, with a richer interface and the option to install extensions, providing additional ways to display varied content.[3]

a022311 311 days ago |

Awesome work! I've been dreaming of this project myself with a very similar stack (basically React instead of Svelte), but I'm very excited to finally have a Raycast alternative for Linux that has both consistent UI and extension compatibility.

The most impressive part is probably your age, because this isn't an easy project even for senior devs!

I haven't tried it yet, but I can't wait to find some time for that.

I've researched applications like this for Linux quite extensively and I think you might find the following tips of interest: - For the slow extension startup issue you mentioned, consider Deno as a runtime as it has a better sandbox and is faster than Node overall. There may be some compatibility issues, but if I remember correctly most stuff is handled by the special Raycast extension libraries which you implement manually anyway. - I'd consider Numbat [0] for replacing the calculator implementation you have now. As far as I can tell, it should have feature parity with SoulverCore and it's also written in Rust, so interfacing with it should be much easier and won't require the FFI work you're doing now. - Project Gauntlet [1] is another project which has gotten quite close to implementing a full-featured Raycast alternative and might be worth taking inspiration from. It would certainly be very cool if you can make the UI rendering native at some point (although I guess Rust isn't perfect for native UI at the moment [2])

Keep up the good work!

[0]: https://github.com/sharkdp/numbat

[1]: https://github.com/project-gauntlet/gauntlet

[2]: https://areweguiyet.com/

mynegation 311 days ago |

Raycast will either hire you or send you a cease-and-desist order. Either way, I would change the name now.

ByteAtATime 311 days ago | |

Fair point! I've actually thought about that before; I've tried to be extremely clear in the project's README with a disclaimer that this is a non-commercial hobby project and is not affiliated with the official Raycast team in any way.

The name is just for identification, as the project's goal is to be a compatible, open-source alternative for the Linux community, a platform they don't currently serve.

That being said, I'll definitely keep it in mind. Thanks for bringing it up!

sangeeth96 311 days ago | | |

That shouldn't matter. They might even have a Linux version in the works, given they are doing Windows now. They are within their rights to ask you to get rid of it. You also seem to be using their brand assets like the logo. I get your intention and love what you were able to accomplish but if you intend for this to grow, you are better off doing this now.

bigyabai 311 days ago | | |

> They are within their rights to ask you to get rid of it.

Only the logo and name. The functionality side should be perfectly fine, there are oodles of precedent for reversing a workable program from someone's commercial API: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....

heavyset_go 311 days ago | | |

True, but a cease & desist will likely include the demand that they cease all operations, and they might be willing to fight that in court, possibly seek damages, etc however likely or unlikely it is that it would hold up. They can pay for a few hours of a lawyer's time to intimidate the OP.

sangeeth96 311 days ago | | |

But prolly can still go after if you resemble it closely enough in terms of looks? I get the API point though, thanks.

kstrauser 311 days ago | | |

Eh, probably not. There are any number of things that look like it. The appearance is the natural outcome of its functionality.

benatkin 311 days ago | | |

It should matter that it's a non-commercial hobby project. It's nice to see the light pushback.

rjzzleep 310 days ago | | |

They use react-native, no? One of the main issues is that all react-native implementations are half baked and dead.

jamil7 310 days ago | | |

The launcher UI is AppKit while the extension APIs allow third-party developers to write them in TS and a React subset. They have a custom renderer for React that turns that into AppKit primatives. So similar in concept but custom and specific to their usecase.

ByteAtATime 311 days ago | | |

That makes sense -- I'll go figure something out, thanks for the explanation!

rafram 311 days ago | | |

“Just for identification” is the point — the name Raycast identifies their product, and it’s their trademark. You can’t use it without permission, even with a disclaimer in the readme.

kstrauser 311 days ago | | |

> The name is just for identification

That’s precisely what they’d dislike about it. You’d be creating “brand confusion” by using their trademark in your own name. You couldn’t make “My Cola (Recreating Coke)” without getting an expensive and inconvenient letter from their legal team.

wlonkly 310 days ago | | |

It's worse than that -- "Recreating Raycast" is just the blog post title, the project is called "raycast-linux".

rmdashrfv 310 days ago | | |

It's also worse than that. It uses the Raycast logo directly in the launcher itself. Which is odd because just above this, OP says:

"I've actually thought about that before; I've tried to be extremely clear in the project's README with a disclaimer that this is a non-commercial hobby project and is not affiliated with the official Raycast team in any way."

Clearly a bright kid, but that's quite a fumble. Among my ideas for being extremely clear about not being affiliated with Raycast I would have to say using their name and using their logo together would be the worst way to communicate that.

kstrauser 310 days ago | | |

Oh dear. Yeah, that’s guaranteed to end badly.

OP: please do change this ASAP so that the Raycast gang doesn’t protest the really neat project you’ve made!

heavyset_go 311 days ago | | |

I've had to look into for my own side projects, you don't want to include brand names, trademarks, etc in your own projects' names and you should be very wary about how you use them in your marketing if you choose to do so at all.

p0w3n3d 311 days ago | | |

I propose cast-a-ray (sounds like castaway and goes along with FOSS wink+tonge-in-cheek style). Or maybe waycast?

volemo 311 days ago | | |

I'm sorry, but in my accent (speech impairment?) "cast-a-ray" sounds almost like "castrate", so I can't back your naming idea. :P

sangeeth96 311 days ago | |

As well as the logo used, name references from all other places and even tweaking the looks a bit.

jraph 311 days ago |

Another runner which can be extended and runs on Linux is KRunner, the one that comes with KDE. Should this inspire you.

kombine 311 days ago | |

KRunner is great, has a lot of features including currency and unit conversion. I use it almost exclusively now.

Sophira 311 days ago |

The readme suggests that Wayland users should add a udev rule to enable direct keyboard access to the user at the physical console (read: to any process spawned by the user at the physical console).

My understanding was that a major touted benefit to Wayland was that it prevents processes from being able to read the keyboard when not focused, unlike on X11, making keyloggers and such a thing of the past.

Doesn't adding a udev rule like this completely bypass that protection?

regularjack 311 days ago |

I'm not one to care for age usually, but I think it's worth mentioning that OP is 15 years old. Well done, great work, please keep building and writing.

flipcoder 311 days ago |

Nice work but change name asap, pivot to something original

7e 311 days ago |

I never liked Raycast over Alfred or Launchbar. They’re trying way too hard to solve non-existent problems and sucking at it.

That said, Linux app launchers are even worse, so I applaud any attempt to improve that situation.

Imustaskforhelp 310 days ago |

211 MB appimage is wild when your premis is linux

What surprises me here is that tauri is supposedly meant for smaller sizes but it doesn't seem to be the case here.

Also, this could be better an issue but shoot, here I go. ./raycast-linux_0.1.0_amd64.AppImage WebSocket server listening on ws://127.0.0.1:7265 Starting initial file index build. Spotlight shortcut: HotKey { mods: Modifiers(ALT), key: Space, id: 65598 } [Snippets] Wayland detected, using evdev for snippet expansion. Updating currency rates... Soulver calculator initialized and currency provider has started updating. Could not create default EGL display: EGL_BAD_PARAMETER. Aborting... Successfully updated 175 currency rates.

Andd it doesn't work.

I personally use something like dmenu (fuzzel) except with my own scripts and keybinds (hyprland).

imcritic 311 days ago |

I don't really see any value in such combines.

You want some calculation? Run calc and do the calculation, do you save so much time by replacing the "run calc" step with "open launcher" that it's worth adding more software to your setup?

porridgeraisin 311 days ago |

I am a big user of launchers. Used fluent search on windows, raycast on my work mac, but used a disparate set of tools on linux till now. This will be great to try.

I have something to say about the (future? didn't find it in the readme) file search feature.

Similar to how fluent search can defer to the everything.exe search index, maybe this app can defer to the fsearch search index, which already has lots of users.

It will save effort and also onboard fsearch users(like me) easily.

evertedsphere 311 days ago |

honey it's 4pm time for your daily frontpage chatgpt readme

johng 311 days ago |

Amazing work! I love Raycast as well!

hiyer 311 days ago |

This is amazing! I was working on something like this myself, but I've not reached anywhere near this level of functionality or polish. Looks like I'll drop it and see if I can contribute to this instead.

jcgl 310 days ago |

Looks like it has a proprietary dependency (the calculator, listed at the bottom of the readme). So it doesn’t seem like this is legitimately open source.

dkarter 311 days ago |

Amazing! one of the few reasons keeping me from using Linux as a daily driver is lack of Raycast support. It has become a huge part of how I use my computer.

_seiryuu_ 311 days ago |

Great work! It's being a bit weird with cosmic shell (the old, gnome-based one), but seems to work pretty well otherwise.

ddaletski 311 days ago |

Nice work. I started working on a similar project too. Maybe I'd better contribute to this one then

philjackson 311 days ago |

This is really impressive work.