Meet this Open Source Launcher inspired by Raycast

If you enjoy the Raycast experience but use Linux, you’ve probably already looked for a truly fast, modern, and extensible alternative. Vicinae was created exactly with that goal in mind.

Vicinae is a launcher written in C++ and Qt, offering native performance, low resource consumption, and compatibility with various extensions from the Raycast ecosystem available for GNU/Linux.

Available features include:

Application search and launching
Clipboard history
File search
Built-in calculator
Emoji picker
Quick window switching
Volume control
Browser tab search
Text expansion (snippets)
Installed fonts navigation

Installation

There are several ways to install it.

AppImage

Download the AppImage from the project’s Releases page:

Vicinae GitHub Releases

Then (example for x86_64):

chmod +x vicinae-vX.Y.Z.AppImage
./vicinae-vX.Y.Z.AppImage server

If your system does not have FUSE support:

./vicinae-vX.Y.Z.AppImage --appimage-extract
cd squashfs-root
./AppRun

You can also download the file:

vicinae-linux-x86_64-vX.Y.Z.tar.gz

Then:

tar -xzf vicinae-linux-x86_64-vX.Y.Z.tar.gz

Copy the executable to a directory in your PATH, such as:

~/.local/bin

Usage

After installation, the first step is to start the service:

vicinae server

If an instance is already running:

vicinae server --replace

Once the server is running, simply use the configured shortcut (or create one in your graphical environment) to open the interface.

You can also control the launcher via the command line:

vicinae open

Close:

vicinae close

Toggle between open and closed:

vicinae toggle

Calculator

Type an expression:

125 * 48

sqrt(144)

The result appears immediately. Other features include: emoji, snippets, …

For more information, visit: the repository.

cpp qt gnulinux