FAQ

macOS says OpenRay is damaged and can’t be opened

The Mac builds are unsigned, so Gatekeeper quarantines them. The app is fine. Clear the quarantine flag once:

xattr -cr /Applications/openray.app

Full explanation in the macOS notes.

The hotkey does nothing

On Windows, the shell reserves most Win combinations and some Alt ones, and a reserved combination fails to register silently. Pick one starting with Ctrl or Alt.

On Wayland, the hotkey is bound through a desktop portal that your compositor may override or refuse. If the confirmation dialog never appeared, or you declined it, bind your desktop’s own shortcut to run openray instead — launching it twice toggles the palette. Recipes for GNOME, KDE and tiling compositors are in Linux notes.

Otherwise, check the combination is not already taken by another command in Settings.

Spotlight opens at the same time as OpenRay

Both are bound to ⌘ Space and both fire. Unbind Spotlight under System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Spotlight, or give OpenRay a different hotkey. See macOS notes.

Paste only copies, it does not paste

On Wayland, no application may type into another one. OpenRay copies to the clipboard and says so rather than pretending. Press paste yourself.

On macOS, grant Accessibility permission. Until you do, every paste falls back to copying. System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility.

Snippet auto-expansion is not firing

Check, in order:

• It is off by default. Turn on Auto-Expand Snippets in Settings → Snippets.
• The snippet needs a keyword. One without a keyword never expands.
• Snippets that take an {argument} are never auto-expanded. Their keyword still works from the palette.
• On Wayland it is not possible at all. On macOS it needs Accessibility permission.

The Snippets settings pane shows a banner when it cannot start, explaining which of these it is.

Search Files or Search Screenshots is missing

Both stay hidden until you configure a folder. Settings → File Search → Search Scopes, or Settings → Screenshots → Search Scopes.

File Search also needs its first background index to finish before results appear.

Menu Bar Search comes up empty

The command appears wherever menu reading is possible in principle, but two platforms often have nothing to give it.

On Windows it reads the classic Win32 menu bar. Electron apps, Store apps and Office draw their own menus and expose nothing, so those come up empty.

On Linux it reads menus over D-Bus from a KDE/Qt or GTK global-menu exporter. A desktop with no such exporter — a stock XFCE session, for instance — publishes nothing to read.

See Menu Bar Search.

Search Files cannot find a file I know is there

The index skips hidden files, and it honours .gitignore, .ignore and your global git excludes. A file you gitignored, or anything starting with a dot, will not appear. See File Search.

Window commands do not move anything

Window control is X11-only on Linux and unavailable on Wayland, where the commands are hidden entirely. On macOS it needs Accessibility permission, prompted on first use.

An extension failed to install

Installing checks that the archive only uses APIs this version of OpenRay provides, and — when the catalogue declares a checksum — that the file matches it. A failure leaves your previous version in place.

If the extension is already installed from a different registry, OpenRay asks before replacing it. Built-in extensions and extensions you are developing locally cannot be replaced at all — stop developing it first.

Where is my data?

	macOS	Linux	Windows
Settings	~/Library/Application Support/openray	~/.config/openray	%APPDATA%\openray
Database	~/Library/Application Support/com.openray.desktop	~/.local/share/com.openray.desktop	%APPDATA%\com.openray.desktop

To move it to another machine, use Import / Export rather than copying files.

Does OpenRay send my data anywhere?

There is no account, and no analytics or telemetry of any kind. OpenRay makes network requests in four places, all of them visible to you:

What	Where it goes	When
AI	Directly to the provider whose key you entered, with no proxy	When you send a message or run an AI Command
Translate	Google’s free translation endpoint	When you translate something
Calculator	A public exchange-rate service	To refresh currency rates when they are over twelve hours old
The Store	The registries you have added	To load catalogues, and to check for updates once a day

Extensions you install can make their own network calls. That is one reason adding a registry is the trust decision — see Trust and security.

Can I use Raycast extensions?

Extensions written against @raycast/api build and run here, and can be pointed at directly from the raycast/extensions monorepo. Compatibility is not total: Raycast’s own AI API and its OAuth.PKCEClient are not implemented, and an extension using an unimplemented API is rejected at install rather than failing halfway through at runtime. See Installing extensions.