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Show HN: Vicinae – A native, Raycast-compatible launcher for Linux
Hi HN!
I’ve always been a fan of application launchers, and I was impressed by the approach the Raycast team took — especially their extension system. About six months ago I started building something similar for Linux, aiming to integrate deeply at the OS level and give extensions a lot of power.
Vicinae is written in C++ with Qt Widgets. I chose Widgets over QML for more imperative control of the UI, especially around extension handling. So far that’s worked well — modern C++ is great.
To support my goals I built a number of custom widgets, including a fully virtualized list that can efficiently render tens of thousands of items. That gave me a lot of respect for Qt — it’s a powerful framework that mostly stayed out of my way.
A key feature is support for Raycast extensions (React + TypeScript), most of which can be installed and used directly inside the launcher (though not all features are implemented yet). There’s also a native API package (@vicinae/api) for writing Vicinae-specific extensions with additional capabilities. This required writing a custom React reconciler — surprisingly straightforward, though still unpolished.
Like Raycast, Vicinae ships with powerful built-in modules, but the goal isn’t to make a clone. I want it to grow into its own project that fits the FOSS model better, while staying compatible with the Raycast ecosystem. I also plan to bring it to other OSes eventually.
I’d love feedback on the technical approach, and suggestions for what would make this useful to you. Contributions are very welcome — I’ve already been pleasantly surprised by how quickly people started helping.
Docs: https://docs.vicinae.com https://docs.vicinae.com
Repo: https://github.com/vicinaehq/vicinae https://github.com/vicinaehq/vicinae
- tertle950 1y agonever knew I wanted this until I saw it! this looks very fully featured and awesome, will keep in mind for the future
- aurellius 1y agoyeah. The general idea of having anything at a few keystrokes is the most amazing thing to me
- tbezman 1y agothis is crazy. nice job
- diath 1y agoThis is actually very impressive - such a high quality project on technical level. I'll definitely dig into the source to see how the React & C++ widgets integration works as it looks like an interesting approach.
- aurellius 1y agoThanks! Honestly a lot of the code you will find has very messy parts to it but that's mostly because I didn't get the time to make it any better yet
- alluro2 1y agoLooks amazing, thank you - installing!
- bazhand 1y agoInstalling (Arch btw), love the UI
- aurellius 1y agothank you! (from a gentoo user, I guess that makes us cousins)
- kevinpiac 1y agoI love it! Incredible work!
- xn--yt9h 1y agoInstallation was easy, and it works as expected without interfering with i3 window controls. However, the sole reason I'm keeping an eye out for raycast-compatible launchers is the ability to integrate the raindrop.io extension - which seems to be broken when used through Vicinae. Maybe someone else running raindrop got it to work; "TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'subscribers')".
- kwbr3000 1y agoYou should join forces with https://github.com/ByteAtATime/raycast-linux https://github.com/ByteAtATime/raycast-linux, mentioned some time ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44551762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44551762
- aurellius 1y agoYeah I know about this project, but I don't know how joining forces would go as the tech stack is entirely different.
- Self-Perfection 1y agoIt would help if somebody makes a comparison. Mostly comparison of consumed RAM with identical set of extensions might help me choose without trying each of this projects.
- aurellius 1y agoI usually try to optimize for CPU usage more than I do for RAM, mostly because I care about my battery life and for things to remain snappy. Although Vicinae does a lot of caching where it can it probably maintains a quite reasonable memory footprint when compared to apps with web frontends.
- Self-Perfection 1y agoIMO after launcher is optimized to be truly idle while there is no interaction with it shaving memory usage becomes more important for snappiness and battery life. Extra RAM that launcher uses it the same RAM that other apps cannot use and therefore become more laggy. I expect on average shaving off 100 MB of launcher RAM usage will save more battery then reducing time for rendering its window by 0.1s Or after a while without interaction bloated RAM get swapped out and launcher invocation need to fetch swapped out info. For comparison here is how krunner looks on my current machine. After some time without interactions: $ systemctl --user status plasma-krunner.service|head ● plasma-krunner.service - KRunner Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/plasma-krunner.service; static) Active: active (running) since Sun 2025-08-10 20:31:40 WEST; 1 month 12 days ago Main PID: 57749 (krunner) Tasks: 37 (limit: 17782) Memory: 64.6M (peak: 1.4G swap: 338.2M swap peak: 679.8M zswap: 12.4M) CPU: 2h 58.702s CGroup: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/background.slice/plasma-krunner.service └─57749 /usr/bin/krunner It seems to me I feel how it was less on the first invocation.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- robinhood 1y agoThis is amazing and incredible. Thanks for this. Raycast is great, and there are not many good launchers on Linux unfortunately. Launchers are so important in my opinion to interact with the computer. I hope this project will change the situation on Linux.
- aurellius 1y agothanks! I think so too. Easy extensibility is also a very important factor imo. I think React (declarative UI in general) has it good there.
- avdept 1y agoAny chance to compile it for macOS ARM?
- aurellius 1y agonot yet but that's the next target
- hmokiguess 1y agoyesssss please
- Gienoz100 1y ago[dead]
- whydoineedthis 1y agoI dont understand why I would use this. Can someone eli5?
- rubymamis 1y agoGreat job! Would love to see a write up on how you implemented that - especially React integration into the Qt app.
- aurellius 1y agoThanks! Yeah I will definitely write something like that in the future
- raun1 1y agoI've been ogling Raycast for a while now, wishing I could have that level of functionality. I'm excited to try this instead of ilia in Regolith.
- imiric 1y agoThis looks very slick and polished. Nice work! I'm used to drun/rofi and enjoy their simplicity, but have also secretly envied the out-of-the-box experience of more fully featured launchers on macOS. I remember using Spotlight and Alfred many years ago, and being impressed by the experience. I like that you chose to make it compatible with Raycast, and how easy it is to extend, based on a quick look at the docs. I'll definitely keep an eye on your project, and give it a try. Thanks for sharing!
- aurellius 1y agoI have a very similar experience, I used mac for a long time, then moved to linux and used the simpler alternatives. Then I found Raycast and their extension system, and thought it would be amazing to have something similar on Linux, so I made this :)
- mkarrmann 1y agoThank you so much for making this!
- sureglymop 1y agoWorks great on hyprland with uwsm! I hope window resizing will be supported as it would be nice for extensions (that wish to resize it temporarily). Already have some extension idea.
- aurellius 1y agoExtension resizing would be tricky from a UX standpoint, as it would make things a little bit unpredictable, but general window resizing will definitely be a thing
- sureglymop 1y agoI'm picturing this: an extension that, for whatever program is under the cursor, tries to list all keyboard shortcuts/hotkeys. One could then search through them or "launch" them from there. I've always wanted to build this as a fullscreen app but this could be even better.
- dinkleberg 1y agoThis is fantastic! Raycast is one of the few things I miss on Linux. It looks like that is no longer the case. Great to see it already has a Nix flake too! I was able to get it setup basically instantly.
- aurellius 1y agoThanks, although it's not up to Raycast's level (yet)!
- mgrandl 1y agoInsanely cool. I wrote my own raycast inspired launcher a while ago and never got around to adding proper extension support. There is also https://github.com/project-gauntlet/gauntlet https://github.com/project-gauntlet/gauntlet which also has react extensions, but not raycast compatible afaik.