After months of beta testing and eager community feedback, Raycast 2.0 is officially out in the wild. If you’ve been relying on this launcher to supercharge your workflow, this update is a massive milestone that brings deep refinements, a smarter AI, and absolute parity across operating systems. The most immediate change you’ll notice is the seamless transition: macOS users will be guided through an upgrade that replaces v1 entirely while keeping beta data perfectly intact, and Windows users are getting bumped straight to version 2.0.0.0 to align both ecosystems without needing to lift a finger.

The biggest shift in this release revolves around how Raycast handles its premium features. During the beta period, users got a free all-access pass to Dictation and AI Chat. With version 2.0, those powerhouse tools are officially graduating into the Raycast Pro tier. While nobody loves losing free features, the blow is softened by a massive under-the-hood upgrade: the default AI Commands model has been bumped to GPT-5.6 Luna, making the assistant sharper and more capable than before. If you just want to test the waters, signing in now triggers an automatic 7-day free trial of Pro, giving you full access to all the top-tier AI models with zero credit card required.

The conversational AI experience has also received a lot of thoughtful polish. You can now clear a chat while keeping its specific model and agent configurations intact. If you’re using the Ask User Question tool, it can now be collapsed to keep your interface tidy while you browse your unanswered prompts, and you can finally mention AI extensions directly when replying. Even the small details have been ironed out—error messages actually tell you how to fix things now, PDF OCR is noticeably better at grabbing context, and code blocks render neatly with four-space tabs.

For heavy dictators, the workflow upgrades are seriously impressive. Context-Aware Paste and Auto Submit are landing as experimental features, fundamentally changing how text hits the page. Context-Aware Paste intelligently looks at the text before your cursor, matching capitalization and adding necessary spacing mid-sentence, while Auto Submit can automatically hit enter after your transcription is pasted. If you’re a Windows user coming from tools like Wispr Flow, Aqua Voice, or Handy, you can even import your custom settings and hotkeys directly into Raycast.

Behind the scenes, the development team has squashed an impressive list of bugs and quality-of-life snags. They’ve added loopback OAuth redirects to the Model Context Protocol (MCP), meaning you can finally connect stubborn providers like Atlassian that reject custom URL schemes. System sleep and wake detection is much more reliable on modern laptops, so Raycast won’t freeze up when you open your lid, and scrolling performance across the entire app has been noticeably smoothed out. Whether it’s fixing how Steam games launch in the File Explorer on Windows, or making sure the center hotkey actually respects macOS Stage Manager, version 2.0 feels like the polished, mature tool we’ve all been waiting for.

Related /

• What is Raycast and why everyone’s using it
• Raycast’s iOS app is here