Raycast on Mac: how to set it up

The app is installed, the window opens, and the next screen is a settings panel with several dozen switches. Most guides answer this by touring features. That tour is the wrong order. Four decisions made in the first ten minutes determine whether the launcher fights with the rest of the Mac later: which key opens it, whether it starts at login, which permissions it gets, and whether it takes a slot in an already crowded menu bar.

Everything below is drawn from the published manual and pricing pages, checked on 10 September 2026. The order is deliberate. Start with the two settings that change how the Mac behaves at boot, then the hotkey, then appearance.

The four settings that actually need a decision

The General tab holds the settings that shape daily behavior. Four of them cannot be left on default without consequence.

Open at Login decides whether the app is running before the first hotkey press. Leaving it on is the documented recommendation, and it is what makes a launcher feel instant. The trade-off is one more process resident from the moment the Mac wakes up.

Show in Menu Bar decides whether an icon appears next to everything else already up there. This is a separate switch from Open at Login, which surprises people who assume that quitting the icon quits the app.

Raycast Hotkey is the global shortcut. On macOS the default is ⌥ Space, which leaves Spotlight untouched on ⌘ Space. That means two launchers, two keys, and a moment of hesitation every time.

Interface Size and Window Mode control how much fits on screen. Compact mode packs more results into the same window. Interface Size offers three steps and scales text, buttons, and fields together.

Settings opens with ⌘ , when the window is up, or by typing Settings into the search bar. Inside Settings, ⌘ F searches across settings, commands, and extensions at once, so nothing has to be remembered by location.

Claiming ⌘ Space means clearing three other owners

Assigning ⌘ Space to the launcher is documented as the way to stop remembering two keys. The press often fails to register, because macOS has already handed that combination out. Three places give it back.

The first is System Settings, Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts, Spotlight, where Show Spotlight search holds the combination by default. Unchecking or changing it frees the key.

The second is the Input Sources section of the same screen. Anyone who has ever added a second keyboard layout carries a language switching shortcut that collides here, often without knowing it is set.

The third is the one most people miss. Under System Settings, Apple Intelligence and Siri, the assistant may be set to a hold of ⌘ Space or ⌥ Space. The hotkey will register anyway, but the window arrives with a small delay on every press, which reads as sluggishness rather than as a conflict.

There is a fourth source of trouble that no amount of settings work will fix. If the shortcut is routed through a key remapping utility, that utility can take a few seconds to become active after the Mac wakes from sleep. A hotkey that fails only in the first seconds after waking is a startup ordering problem, not a configuration problem.

Permissions are granted per feature, not once

Nothing here is a single all-or-nothing prompt. The published troubleshooting page ties specific permissions to specific features, which means an unused feature can simply go without.

macOS permission	What stops working without it
Accessibility	Global hotkeys, snippet expansion, reading and triggering another app's menu items
Screen Recording	Window management
Microphone	Dictation

The manual states it directly:

Confirm Raycast is enabled under Accessibility (needed for hotkeys and snippet expansion). Confirm Raycast is enabled under Screen Recording (needed for window management). Source: manual.raycast.com

Two practical consequences follow. First, a Mac that never uses window tiling never needs to hand over screen recording. Fewer grants means fewer entries to re-check after a macOS update. Second, when one feature breaks after an update and the rest keep working, the table above is the diagnosis. Hotkeys dead but everything else fine points at Accessibility. Tiling dead but hotkeys fine points at Screen Recording.

If the app is listed under a permission but behaves as though it is not, the documented fix is to toggle that permission off, wait, and turn it back on. The listing and the actual grant can drift apart, particularly across major macOS upgrades.

What the menu bar icon is actually for

The icon does three things: open Settings, check for updates, and quit the app. The manual is explicit about the scope.

Toggle whether Raycast appears in the menu bar. When enabled, you can quickly access Settings, check for updates, and quit the app from the menu bar icon. Source: manual.raycast.com

All three are reachable from the search window. Settings is ⌘ ,. Checking for updates and quitting are both commands that appear by typing their names. So turning the icon off costs nothing in capability, and it does not strand anyone outside their own settings.

Keeping it on is still a reasonable choice for two situations: watching for updates without opening anything, and quitting quickly when something is misbehaving. The deciding question is narrow. Is there room for one more icon on this particular Mac, on the smallest screen it ever runs on.

One detail worth knowing before flipping the switch on a second machine. Show in Menu Bar is one of the General settings included in the synced categories, alongside Open at Login, Appearance, Interface Size, and Window Mode. Turning it off on one Mac signed into the same account can turn it off on the other.

Extensions add menu bar items of their own

Turning off the app's own icon does not stop new icons from appearing, because extensions place their own.

The calendar feature can show the next event in the menu bar, with options for when it appears: never, always, only when an event is approaching, or once a start time is within a set number of minutes. It can be filtered to meetings only, and set to hide itself automatically after an event ends. A focus session can also be moved out of its floating panel and parked in the menu bar while it runs.

So the count does not grow with every extension installed. It grows with every extension that has a resident component. Checking for that before installing is faster than untangling the bar afterwards.

Removal is straightforward. Selecting an extension in the Settings sidebar exposes an Uninstall button, and right-clicking offers the same. There is a middle option that is easy to overlook: individual commands can be disabled one by one, so an extension can stay installed while the part that sits in the menu bar is switched off.

Where the bar is already full, the useful question is not how to remove icons but how to reach a hidden one quickly. A menu bar manager for macOS varies on exactly that point, and the number of clicks between a collapsed bar and an icon's own menu is the difference that shows up every day. The Features page sets out what that looks like in practice.

Three appearance settings that are worth one pass

Appearance was listed last for a reason, but three of these settings are worth setting once rather than never, because the defaults assume a single screen.

Show Raycast on decides which display the window appears on in a multi-monitor setup. The choices are the screen containing the mouse pointer, the screen holding the active window, or the primary screen. Left on default, the window has a habit of opening on whichever display the reader is not looking at, and that gets attributed to the app being slow rather than to a setting.

Window Mode switches between compact and expanded layouts. Compact fits more results in the same space, which matters most on a laptop screen where the list is short to begin with.

Pop to Root Search sets how long the app waits before resetting to the top level after the window is dismissed. It can reset immediately, or hold the current position for up to 180 seconds. Holding position suits repetitive work, where the same command gets run several times in a row and returning to a blank search bar each time is wasted motion.

Two smaller settings sit nearby and are easy to try. Emacs and Vim style key bindings can be enabled for moving through lists and text fields. Navigation behavior can be adjusted so that pressing Esc either returns to the top level or closes the window outright, which is a matter of habit rather than of correctness.

Version 2, system requirements, and the duplicate app trap

The current major version carries stated system requirements of macOS Tahoe on Apple silicon, with Windows 10 or later on the other platform. That is a narrower range than many long-running Mac utilities, and it is the first thing to check on an older machine.

The migration from version 1 has one documented failure mode worth avoiding. Installing the new version manually while the old one is still present prompts macOS to ask whether to replace the existing app or keep both. Choosing to keep both leaves two applications in the Applications folder, and the one that launches is still the old one, which makes the new version look like it never installed. The fix is to quit, delete both copies, and install once more.

Permissions inherited from the previous version may also need to be re-authorized after the upgrade. That is expected behavior, not a fault, and it lands back on the permissions table above.

Export the configuration before anything else breaks

The Advanced tab has an export and import function that writes the whole configuration to a file: extensions, hotkeys, aliases, and preferences. Reading it back on another machine rebuilds the setup without repeating any of the decisions above.

This matters in two moments. One is a new Mac. The other is a reinstall done to isolate a problem, which is exactly when nobody wants to redo permissions and hotkeys by hand.

Cloud sync covers a different set. Snippets, quicklinks, notes, themes, window layouts, chat history, and several General settings travel between machines on the same account. Clipboard history does not. It is listed as data that always stays on the device, which is worth knowing before assuming a new Mac will arrive with everything intact. Paid tiers are documented on the Pricing page for the launcher itself, and the trade-offs between resident tools are the sort of thing the How it compares page exists to lay out.

What to change first

Turn on Open at Login, then decide the menu bar icon question by looking at the smallest screen this Mac ever uses. Clear the three owners of ⌘ Space before assigning it, and grant only the permissions tied to features actually in use. If the bar is already crowded before any of this, a menu bar organizer belongs in the same session, and Koffret is one way to hold that space open.