I have been using Raycast for years, and it is easily one of my favorite Mac apps. It does so much without ever getting in the way, which is exactly what you want from a productivity tool. So naturally, when Raycast 2.0 landed, I updated within minutes.
For the most part, I love all the new features and interface changes that came with the new update. But there is one change that has been quietly annoying me every single day since I updated, and I need to talk about it.
The clipboard change that broke my workflow
The culprit is the updated clipboard history feature. In Raycast 2.0, the clipboard now saves the original format you copied and restores it when you paste. On paper, that sounds like a great improvement. In practice, at least for me, it has been a nightmare.
The problem is that I relied on the old behavior. Previously, when I copied text from a website or a document and pasted it somewhere, Raycast would strip the formatting and give me clean, plain text. That made it incredibly easy to paste copied content anywhere without worrying about broken fonts or mismatched styles bleeding into my notes or documents.
I had to use a keyboard shortcut if I wanted to paste the text with original formatting. Now Raycast has reversed this behavior. By default, every paste comes loaded with whatever formatting the source had, and I spend more time cleaning things up than I ever did before. It sounds like a small thing, but it has seriously hampered my workflow. I spend more time cleaning up pasted text than I ever did before.
So, how do you fix it?
The good news is that there are two ways to deal with this. The first is a built-in keyboard shortcut that Raycast already supports. When you bring up the clipboard manager and want to paste something without formatting, use Command + Control + Enter instead of the regular Enter. This pastes the copied content as plain text and skips all the formatting entirely.
While I am happy that this option exists, it’s been days since I installed the update, and I have still not built up the muscle memory for it. If only Raycast allowed us to switch the default behavior to plain text and use the other keyboard shortcut for pasting with retained formatting.
There is also a free Raycast extension called Clipboard Formatter, built by Josh Temple. It removes all formatting from whatever text is sitting in your clipboard, returning it as clean, plain text. The issue is that it doesn’t automatically remove the formatting, requiring you to manually trigger it.
Both options require user input, which adds a step to the whole process. I just wish Raycast would let me set plain-text pasting as the default behavior.
What else is new in Raycast 2.0?
The clipboard complaint aside, Raycast 2.0 is a genuinely great update. The AI Chat has been overhauled and now includes a Memory feature that picks up context about you over time, so conversation should start feeling a lot more personal.
File search now works inside root search, and the results appear faster and are more accurate. Snippets and Quicklinks both got tagging support, which is a big deal if you have built up a large collection over the years.
Dictation is a brand-new addition that transcribes your speech and pastes it directly into whatever app you are working in. It is a part of Raycast Pro, though. Overall, it’s a nice update. So yes, update to Raycast 2.0. Just make sure you sort out the clipboard situation first.