Recently, I've written quite a bit about Raycast, and how it's my absolute favorite app on macOS, and now on Windows as well, thanks to the recent beta launch. But outside of macOS, I'm more of a Linux user these days, and I recently expressed my wish that Raycast would come there, too.

Thankfully, someone in the comments of that article mentioned an app I had never heard of: Vicinae, and it was a bit of a revelation. Vicinae is an attempt at essentially porting Raycast to Linux, replicating its UI and many of its features. I've been using it ever since, and while it's not everything I had dreamed of, it does bring me one step closer to that ideal world.

Raycast on Linux

Vicinae is almost a carbon copy

As a very quick intro, Raycast is a launcher on macOS and Windows, which lets you open apps, access settings, and much more through the use of plug-ins. It's a heavily keyboard-focused launcher, meaning you open it with a keyboard shortcut and type whatever you want to access, and it all responds very quickly and works smoothly.

It's almost jarring just how close Vicinae gets to Raycast in terms of its UI and features. Being on Linux, it can't automatically register a shortcut as it does on other platforms, and instead, you can use the built-in settings on your desktop environment to create the shortcut you want to run the Vicinae command. You can also summon the Vicinae directly from terminal using the vicinae toggle command (which is actually a recent change).

Once you launch it, though, the Vicinae launcher bar looks extremely similar and works in much the same way, too. It also comes with similar features, including two of my favorites: the clipboard history and emoji picker. These are available out of the box, and, at least in Arch Linux, they seem to work great, with some caveats we'll get to later.

Even the extensions are here

It goes above and beyond

What's most impressive about Vicinae to me is that it even goes the extra mile to try and ensure Raycast extensions can be ported over with minimal work. Sure, not all of them are here, but there are a lot already. Some of my favorites I've mentioned in the past are the YouTube extension, which lets me search videos or channels, as well as the Video Downloader extension, which lets me download those videos in a wide range of quality options.

Both of those are available here, though the video downloader unfortunately doesn't seem to work. For YouTube search, you just provide the API key and you're off to the races, with the downside that humbnails are too large and I can only see one per page. The video downloader, however, seems to fail to detect the presence of yt-dlp and ffmpeg, so it doesn't work.

Another extension I like to bring up is the Pokedex, which can find information on any of the fictional characters in the games. That one isn't even available in the official Raycast beta for Windows yet, but I can install it in Vicinae, and it works totally fine. All the information is here, and it's displayed just as it is on the official Raycast version on macOS.

And those are just the examples that cater to me. You have (at least) dozens of extensions from the Raycast Store available here, including for Slack, VS Code, GitHub, Home Assistant, AdGuard Home, and a whole lot more. Because it's literally just feeding off the Raycast Store, it's hard to say exactly which extensions exist and work on Linux out of the thousands of official ones, but the potential is there, and extension developers should be able to make things work on Linux with minimal tweaks, according to the developer.

Customizable look

And for free

While Vicinae has some downsides compared to the official Raycast app, there's actually one somewhat notable benefit to this Linux version. Raycast requires you to pay for the Pro version to have access to theming options, but Vicinae comes with a few themes out of the box that cost no money to use.

You're not stuck with the default dark theme, and there are actually a ton of options for both darker and lighter themes depending on your preference. You can check out some of the options in the screenshots above, but there are even more.

Setting up is a bit complicated

Linux is far too varied

One of the downsides of Vicinae is that it suffers a bit from the fact that it's on Linux, which is an incredibly varied ecosystem in itself. It's not like a Windows or macOS app that will work on any modern version (barring some very specific errors). Depending on your distro, the installation process can be very different, and the results can, too. I used Vicinae on Arch Linux, and setting it up there is relatively easy if you have a package manager such as yay to access the Arch User Repository.

However, even a popular distro like Ubuntu already has more complex installation instructions, and frankly, I couldn't get it to work. There is also an AppImage file that should make things a bit easier, but it comes with its own limitations, such as not being able to monitor the clipboard in many cases, making the situation that much more complex.

Depending on your desktop environment, you may also need some additional setup. For example, while KDE Plasma worked fine out of the box, GNOME requires an extension to enable the full functionality of Vicinae, including the clipboard history.

I can't claim to understand the intricacies of Linux development and packaging, but I wonder if a Flatpak version of the app would be the best way to make it available on multiple distros and (hopefully) ensure that it also works well on all of them. But with more complex features like monitoring the clipboard, I can see how that might be a challenge since those things can be implemented very differently in each distro or desktop environment.

There are some limitations

Vicinae still needs to cook a bit longer

Even setting aside some of the extra steps you may need, your experience with Vicinae will vary somewhat depending on your setup. I tested Vicinae on two laptops: one with KDE Plasma and another with GNOME and COSMIC. I noticed that on KDE, summoning Vicinae takes a split second longer than GNOME, while COSMIC seems to be the fastest, likely because of the lack of animations. But using Vicinae in COSMIC had its own issues, as anything that required drawing a new window seemed to break, such as opening Vicinae settings or the Raycast Store.

It's likely because COSMIC is in beta, but on that desktop environment, I also noticed that the Vicinae server (the backend for the app) is terminated whenever you dismiss the window. That means you need to wait a couple of seconds for the server to start back up before you can summon Vicinae again.

The most important drawback, though, in my opinion, comes from the fact that the entire idea of keyboard shortcuts just doesn't work the same way here. Because shortcuts are exclusively controlled by the system, you can't set hotkeys to launch a specific Vicinae extension, such as the clipboard history or emoji selector. You always have to summon the launcher first.

Aliases are still supported, meaning you can set a shortname for a specific action to bring it up, but it just takes a bit longer that way. It's also worth noting that, unless an extension supports search inline in the same search bar, you can't just hit Tab to start searching for results within a given extension. It needs to be selected with Enter.

Vicinae is a wonderful idea

My thoughts on Vicinae may seem as much negative as they are positive, but it's important to remember that Raycast is my favorite app ever, and bringing that to Linux, even with some flaws, is already a huge positive. Vicinae is a relatively new project that hasn't reached a stable release yet, so you shouldn't expect perfection.

I will definitely be keeping Vicinae on my machine, and I'm very excited to see how it keeps evolving. With any luck, it could even get an official endorsement from Raycast, and that could push extension developers to optimize for Linux, too. Only time will tell, but what we have now is already great.