Raycast stays out of your way but is always ready when you need it. This page gives you a brief overview of the basic concepts of Raycast.

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Here are the basics to move quickly from your intent to an action:

• Press the global Hotkey to open Raycast from anywhere (default: ⌥ Space).
• On the root, search for apps and commands and open them with ↵.
• Use the suggestions, to open frequently and recently used ones even quicker.
• Extensions are at the core of Raycast. Enable them in the Settings to get new commands, such as File Search. And install core Extensions from the Store & Extensions, for example, the Jira extension allows you to create and check issues without opening a browser, as well as Extensions built by our Developer community.

<aside> 💡 Pro Tip: You can use Raycast as your default launcher and replace Spotlight. This way you keep your muscle memory for your global hotkey.

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First Steps

A couple of things you should try out to familiarize yourself with Raycast:

1. Search for an application in the root search and launch it with ↵.
2. Type sf in the root search to open the Search Files command. By default, you see your recently opened files.
3. Enable extensions in the Settings and explore the commands. F.e. the Calendar extension makes it trivial to create or check upcoming events, and join meetings easily.
4. Enter any math expression in the root search and copy the result with ↵. Check out some examples of our powerful Calculator .
5. Open the Clipboard History command to see text you copied earlier.
6. Join our Slack Community to have a stake in our product roadmap.
7. Replace Spotlight with Raycast