A technical deep dive into the new Raycast

The gist

• Raycast shipped the public beta of Raycast 2.0 on May 14, 2026, its biggest release since the 2020 launch and the first version running on both macOS and Windows.
• The rewrite, code-named "X-Ray" for cross-platform Raycast, mixes TypeScript, Swift, C#, Rust, Node and React after the team started considering Windows in late 2023.
• The team evaluated Electron, Tauri and a custom hybrid stack, and rejected Electron partly because they did not want to bundle Chromium on macOS when they could use system WebKit.
• Raycast 2.0 has four parts: platform host apps (Swift/AppKit on macOS, C# with .NET 8 and WPF on Windows), one React + TypeScript frontend, a single long-lived Node backend, and a Rust core.
• A new Rust file indexer replaces Spotlight, and on Windows it reads the NTFS Master File Table directly to index an entire drive in seconds rather than minutes.
• A Windows engineer summed up the approach: "we're not a web app with some native hooks sprinkled on top. We're a native app that uses web for its UI."

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