Raycast: how to uninstall it cleanly

Dragging the app to the Trash takes two seconds and leaves three things behind: support files in the home folder, permission entries in System Settings, and, if a paid plan was ever started, a subscription that keeps renewing on schedule. None of those are unusual for a Mac app. All three are easy to miss, and the third one costs money every month it goes unnoticed.

What follows is the order that avoids leftovers, the way to find files without guessing at paths, and the parts of the removal that happen outside the Mac entirely. All product details below were checked against the published manual and pricing page on 10 September 2026.

Settle three questions before anything goes in the Trash

Is there a paid plan attached to the account? Billing is tied to an account, not to an installed copy. Deleting the app changes nothing about the renewal date. This is the only step in the whole process that cannot be undone by reinstalling.

Should the configuration be saved? The Advanced tab exports the whole setup to a file: extensions, hotkeys, aliases, and preferences. Anyone removing the app to test whether it is causing a problem will want that file, because a reinstall without it means rebuilding permissions, hotkeys, and extension settings by hand.

Is removal actually the goal? If the aim is a free slot in the menu bar rather than a lighter Mac, there is a shorter route covered in the next section.

One extra check applies to anyone signed in on more than one Mac. Snippets, quicklinks, notes, themes, window layouts, and several general settings sync between machines on the same account. Clipboard history does not. It is documented as data that always stays on the device, so anything worth keeping from it has to come out before the app does.

Switching things off is not the same as removing them

Three separate switches produce three different outcomes, and only one of them requires deleting anything.

Action	What changes	What stays
Turn off Show in Menu Bar	The icon disappears	The app runs, the hotkey works
Turn off Open at Login	Nothing starts at boot	The app is still installed and launchable
Disable an extension's commands	That extension's menu bar item goes away	The extension stays installed
Delete the app	Nothing runs	Support files, permission entries, subscription

The menu bar icon is worth a closer look before deciding. It offers three actions: open Settings, check for updates, and quit. All three are reachable by typing their names into the search window, and Settings also opens with ⌘ ,. Turning the icon off therefore costs no capability at all, which makes it the right first move for anyone whose real complaint is a crowded bar rather than the app itself.

Extensions are the other half of that picture. The calendar feature can put the next event in the menu bar, with options for when it appears and whether it hides itself after the event ends. A focus session can be parked there while it runs. Both can be switched off at the command level without removing the extension.

The order that avoids leftovers

Quitting comes first. The published troubleshooting steps describe it plainly, alongside where the logs live:

Quit Raycast fully via the menu bar icon or the Quit Raycast command, and wait a few seconds for it to disappear from Activity Monitor. Clear existing logs: in Finder, press ⇧ ⌘ G, paste ~/Library/Logs/com.raycast.macos, and move the folder's contents to the Trash. Source: manual.raycast.com

Two useful facts sit inside that instruction. Quitting works from either the menu bar icon or a command, so an icon that has already been hidden is not a problem. And the log folder is named after the bundle identifier, com.raycast.macos, which is the key to finding everything else.

Second, turn off Open at Login while Settings is still reachable. That registration also appears in System Settings under General, Login Items. Removing the app first can leave an entry pointing at nothing, which is harmless but untidy and slightly confusing later.

Doing these two steps in the other order is the single most common way to end up with a stray login item. Once the app is deleted, the Settings window that holds the switch is gone with it, and the only remaining route is the System Settings list, which shows a name with no application behind it. Nothing breaks, but the entry has to be cleared from a different screen than the one that created it.

Third, move the app from the Applications folder to the Trash. Confirm in Activity Monitor that no process with the same name is still running before doing it, otherwise macOS objects mid-move.

Finding what stayed behind, without guessing at paths

macOS gives every app a bundle identifier and files get named after it. That convention is what makes cleanup mechanical rather than exploratory, and it is documented on Apple's developer site.

The identifier here is com.raycast.macos. The manual confirms one path directly, ~/Library/Logs/com.raycast.macos. The rest follow the same pattern. In Finder, press ⇧ ⌘ G, enter ~/Library, then search inside that folder for the identifier. Everything associated with the app surfaces in one list.

The usual locations are these:

• ~/Library/Application Support
• ~/Library/Caches
• ~/Library/Preferences
• ~/Library/Logs
• ~/Library/Saved Application State

Searching by identifier beats typing paths from memory, because a display name and a folder name do not always match, and a typed path that does not exist simply returns nothing rather than warning that something was missed.

Whether to delete what turns up depends on intent. A permanent removal can take all of it. A reinstall meant to preserve the setup can leave it in place, and the configuration comes back. A reinstall meant to diagnose a fault should remove it, since stale settings are one of the things being ruled out, which is exactly why the export in step one matters.

Permissions outlive the app

Deleting an app does not clear its entries from System Settings, Privacy and Security. Three lists are worth checking, because this app requests permissions per feature rather than all at once.

Accessibility covers global hotkeys, snippet expansion, and reading another app's menu items. Screen Recording covers window management. Microphone covers dictation. Any of the three that were granted will still show the app's name after removal, and the minus button clears them.

Knowing which permission maps to which feature also settles a question that comes up during removal: whether anything was reading the screen or the keyboard in a way that should be revoked with urgency. The mapping is public and narrow. Accessibility is what a hotkey needs in order to fire from any app, and what snippet expansion needs in order to type into another app's text field. Screen Recording is what any window arranging tool needs in order to see window frames. Neither is exotic for this category of app, and both are removed with a single click once the app is gone.

Skipping this causes no functional harm. It does make the Accessibility list longer, and that list is already the busiest one on any Mac that runs keyboard tools. A long list of names pointing at deleted apps makes the next permission problem harder to diagnose than it needs to be.

There is one case where this step is not optional. If the plan is to remove and reinstall in order to fix a misbehaving feature, clearing the permission entries first is part of the fix. The documented advice for a permission that is listed but not working is to toggle it off and back on, and a clean slate achieves the same thing without ambiguity.

The subscription bills an account, not a Mac

This is the part that survives everything done on the machine.

Checked on the published pricing page on 10 September 2026, the individual paid plan is listed at $10 per month billed monthly, or $8 per month on the annual option, described as a 20 percent discount. An advanced model add-on is listed at a further $8 per month. Team plans are listed separately, with a free tier at $0 per user per month and a paid tier at $15 per user per month, or $12 annually.

Cancellation depends on where the subscription started.

A subscription started on the website is cancelled from account settings on that website. Cancelling ends auto-renewal, paid features continue until the existing renewal date, and the account reverts to the free tier afterwards.

A subscription started inside the iOS app is managed through the App Store subscriptions list on an iOS device. The documentation is explicit that a subscription created there cannot be cancelled from the web side.

The trial has its own rule that catches people out. A new paid plan starts with a seven day free trial and then bills automatically at the end of it. Each account gets one trial. Ending a subscription and starting again later means billing begins immediately, with no second trial period. Anyone removing the app during a trial should cancel before the seventh day rather than assume that deleting the app counts.

Two copies, and the key that Spotlight is missing

Version numbers matter here more than they usually do, because the current major release states system requirements of macOS Tahoe on Apple silicon. A Mac that falls outside that range cannot run the newest build, which is itself a common reason for reaching this page. Anyone removing the app for that reason should know that the constraint is the operating system version, not the removal, and that reinstalling on the same machine will hit the same wall.

A manual install performed while an older version is still present triggers a macOS prompt asking whether to replace the existing app or keep both. Choosing Keep Both leaves two applications, and the one that launches is the older one. During removal the same trap appears in reverse: deleting one copy leaves the other running. Activity Monitor showing two processes with the same name is the tell, and checking for a duplicate is one of the first steps in the published troubleshooting list.

The last item is a setting that was changed on the way in. If the global hotkey was moved to ⌘ Space, that combination was taken away from Spotlight to make room. Removing the app does not give it back. Open System Settings, Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts, Spotlight, and re-enable Show Spotlight search. The input source switcher and the Siri shortcut on the same screen may also have been disabled for the same reason. Without this step, ⌘ Space does nothing at all after the uninstall, which reads as a broken Mac rather than a missing setting.

What to change first

Cancel the subscription before touching the app, since that is the only step a reinstall cannot undo. Then export the configuration, quit, turn off the login item, delete the app, and search ~/Library for com.raycast.macos. If the goal behind all of this was simply a menu bar that fits, decide what stays visible before installing anything else, and let a menu bar organizer such as Koffret hold the rest.