Raycast Pro Is on Windows — And I Built an Extension for It
I've wanted to write about Raycast for a while. Today finally feels like the right day: Raycast Pro just launched on Windows, and my own Raycast extension went live on the store. It's a good moment to tie it all together — what Raycast is, why I built on it, and what the Windows launch means.
What Raycast is (if you've never used it)
Raycast is a launcher — the thing you pop up with a hotkey to search apps, files, and actions on your computer. Think of it as a command bar for your whole machine. You press a key, type a few letters, and it finds whatever you need: open an app, run a command, search a note, even control smart home stuff.
It started on macOS, and Mac users love it. There's a reason it became the default for a lot of developers and power users.
The big news: Raycast Pro is now on Windows
Raycast officially supports Windows now, and Pro is the paid tier with the good but entirely not necessary for everyone stuff (iⁿ mʸ oᵖⁱⁿⁱᵒⁿ) — AI features, cloud sync, themes, and more.
I've got a 7-day free trial right now because I participated in the Beta for Windows, so I'm testing it properly.
(I said not necessary because I honestly have not needed all these pro features a lot during the beta)
For Windows users this is genuinely interesting. Windows has had launchers (PowerToys Run, Flow Launcher, etc.), but Raycast brings a whole ecosystem: the store, extensions, and AI baked in. It's not just "search your apps faster" — it's a platform.
Yh I know I'm glazing but that's the whole point right, if it's good it's good and trust me it's good 🙌🏻
And I built an extension for it
This is the part I'm geeked about😁
I made a Raycast extension called Cook — it lets you browse, view, and generate shopping lists from your Cooklang recipe collection, all from the Raycast command bar.
P.S - I've been a little bit more into cooking recently, who am I kidding 😂, In the last two months I've cooked more than I've cooked for the rest of my life and I've still not cooked a lot 😭, and obviously I setup a whole recipe and cooking system that works on my phone and laptop - typical overthinking me and I decided why not get an extension for this in my favorite launcher, you know what I'll have to make a proper post for this
View Recipes — search and browse your recipes with ingredients, cookware, and steps rendered properly
Shopping List — pick multiple recipes and get one combined ingredient list
Pantry — browse your pantry inventory with filters
Start Server — launch the CookCLI web UI in your browser
It's live on the Raycast Store right now. Currently macOS-only, but I'm working on adding Windows platform support — the PR is in review.
This is built entirely on top of Cooklang, a lightweight, open-source, human-readable language for writing and structuring recipes, designed to make cooking data portable, programmable, and future-proof and Cook CLI, an open-source command-line tool for working with Cooklang recipe files so a big shout out and thank you to the people behind it - Alex Dubowski - the creator of Cooklang and the rest of the open source community.
What building an extension is like
Raycast extensions are TypeScript, and the developer experience is surprisingly good. You write a command, define how it shows in the search bar, and the API handles the UI. My extension talks to CookCLI.
I (and AI 👀) gave it a proper UI layer on top of that CLI — search, scale portions, generate shopping lists. Also a lot of crashing out on why AI cannot one-shot a usable extension 😭
The whole thing started as a side project to scratch my own itch: I have a recipe collection, and I wanted to browse it without opening a terminal. It turned into a published extension in the Raycast Store, which still feels good 😌.
Should you get Raycast?
Honest take: if you're on macOS, yes — try it, the free tier is genuinely useful. If you're on Windows, the launch is new, so it's worth a trial run to see if the ecosystem lands for you. The AI features in Pro are nice, but the core launcher is free and great on its own.
I'll be writing more about Raycast and what you can do with it as I keep using it on Windows — and about my extension(s) journey, because I have klept-extensio-mania 😂
P.S. — I'm planning to join the Raycast affiliate program once I can (you have to be 18 to create a Wise account for payouts, and that's a few months away for me). When that's live I'll share a referral code. Until then, the free trial and the store links are all you need.
