The best thing about a keyboard launcher is never the launcher. It is the long tail of small tools people build for it: a Hacker News reader, a process killer, a colour picker, a lookup for whatever your team uses every day. Raycast has thousands of them, written in TypeScript and React and published in the open. Until now, using any of them meant running Raycast next to Droppy, with two launchers fighting over your muscle memory.
Thunderstorm, the launcher built into Droppy, now runs them. You browse the Raycast Store from inside Droppy, install an extension, and its commands show up in the same list as your apps, files and settings. If you already have a set you rely on, Thunderstorm imports them from Raycast in one go.
Availability, September 27, 2026: extension support landed after Droppy 16.0's release notes were written, so it reaches you with the next Droppy update. If Thunderstorm's settings do not show an Extensions page yet, you are one update away. Everything below describes that build.
Why a launcher should take other people's work
I rebuilt Thunderstorm for Droppy 16 as a full Spotlight replacement: apps, files, System Settings pages, a calculator with units and currencies, web search, and everything Droppy itself knows about, from your clipboard history to the files on your shelf. That covers the daily core. What no single developer can cover is the long tail, and I would rather not pretend otherwise.
The Raycast community already solved the long tail, with a clean API and a public store where every extension is open source. Teaching Thunderstorm to speak that API means the work those developers put in is not locked to one app. You pick the launcher you like, and the tools come along.
Two ways in: the store, or your Raycast folder
The store. The Extensions page lists the Raycast Store's public catalogue with each extension's maker, description, commands and install count, and a search field on top. Install downloads the extension's prebuilt bundle, the same one Raycast would install, and keeps its commands, assets and package.json in Droppy's support folder. There is also an Extension Store command in Thunderstorm itself, so you can go looking without opening Settings.
Import. If Raycast is on this Mac, the page counts the extensions you have installed there and offers Import All, or run Import Raycast Extensions from the launcher. Droppy copies the bundles, not a reference to them, so the import keeps working if you later remove Raycast. One honest limit: Raycast stores extension preferences encrypted, so API keys and settings you entered there cannot come across. The first time an imported extension needs a key, Thunderstorm asks for it.
How it runs, and what that means for your Mac
Raycast extensions are JavaScript, so something has to run JavaScript. Thunderstorm's Extension runtime row shows what it uses: a Node.js 18 or newer that is already installed, or, if there is none, the current release downloaded from nodejs.org and checked against its published checksum. React and its reconciler come from npm, also checked against their published hashes. Nothing is installed until you press Install, and Remove takes it all away again.
Each extension runs in its own Node process beside Droppy, not inside it. The extension describes what it wants on screen, a list, a grid, a detail page or a form, and Thunderstorm draws that in its own native panel with its own keyboard handling. That separation matters: an extension that misbehaves takes down its own process, not your shelf, clipboard or media controls.
It is still code from the internet running as you, the same as it would be in Raycast. Extensions in the Raycast Store are open source and reviewed in Raycast's public repository before they are listed, which is a real safeguard, but read what an extension does before giving it an API key, the way you would anywhere else.
What works today
I would rather give you the exact list than the word "compatible". Here is what the host implements in this first release.
Lists with sections, accessories and detail panes, grids, Markdown detail pages with metadata, and forms with text fields, text areas, dropdowns, checkboxes, date pickers, tag pickers and file pickers. Navigation pushes and pops like it does in Raycast.
Action panels with their keyboard shortcuts, confirm alerts, toasts with their own actions, and the HUD for commands that finish quietly.
Clipboard copy, paste and read, open a URL or file in an app, show in Finder, move to Trash, selected text, selected Finder items, and the installed and frontmost apps.
Extension and command preferences with their own settings page, LocalStorage and Cache, kept per extension in Droppy's support folder.
Raycast AI, OAuth sign-in, the browser extension, window management calls, launching one command from another, and menu bar commands, which are left out of the launcher. A call that is not available yet ends in a toast that says so, not a silent failure.
Taken from the extension host in Droppy's source, not from a marketing list.
In practice that covers a large share of the store: readers for news sites and feeds, generators and converters, developer utilities, process and port killers, search tools for documentation and package registries. Extensions built around a sign-in to a third-party service are the ones most likely to hit the OAuth gap for now.
Where the commands show up
An installed extension's commands are ordinary Thunderstorm results. Type part of the name and it is there, ranked with everything else, with the extension's own icon. Pick it and the extension's view opens inside the same panel, so the search field, the arrow keys and ⌘K for actions behave the way they do everywhere else in Thunderstorm. Escape goes back a level, and back to your search from the top.
Each installed extension also gets its own page under Settings, Thunderstorm, listing its commands and its preferences, with Uninstall at the bottom. Uninstalling removes its commands from the launcher and deletes its stored preferences.
The same update makes Thunderstorm a lot deeper
Extensions arrive alongside a larger library of built-in tools, so you need fewer of them to begin with: quicklinks with an {argument} filled from what you type, snippets that expand in any app, script commands, Apple Shortcuts, a window switcher, menu bar search, dictionary lookup, Markdown notes, colour conversions, calculator history, and backup and import of the whole library. Any quicklink, snippet or script can get its own global hotkey on Droppy's Shortcuts page, and a compact window option opens Thunderstorm as the search bar alone.
Should you switch?
If Raycast is the centre of your day and you pay for its AI or its cloud sync, keep it; I compared the two honestly in Droppy vs Raycast. If you mostly use Raycast to launch apps and run a handful of community extensions, Thunderstorm now covers that from inside an app that also handles your notch, shelf, clipboard, media and screenshots, for a one-time price. Try your five most-used extensions. If they work, that is one less app in your menu bar.