you'll love Raycast, here's why ❤️
Getting the tooling of daily tasks right is super important. Working with fast, well-designed, and useful tools can unlock so much more productivity (or flow-state) – and Raycast definitely ticks these boxes.
TLDR: Spotlight, but on steroids. It can do everything you’re used to, but better and with more integrations.
⌘ + Space opens the floating window on top of everything, that provides an entry point into all its commands. The following list includes some of my personal favorites, but certainly is not complete. The great thing about the app is that everyone can make it their own and use it in so many different ways.
🙃 Supercharged Emojis & GIFs
Before we’re getting into the (actually useful) stuff, one of my favorite commands: Type emo + Enter and it shows me all emojis. Similar to the MacOS emoji browser, but nicer and a lot faster!. You can also add some emojis to your favorites and add custom keywords for faster access.
✨ AI chat
AI here, AI there,… But inside Raycast, this is actually useful. You do have the context of your environment (e.g. text that you copied), but don’t need to open another tool or another website to do something with it.
Raycast (at least the Advanced AI subscription) has the benefit, that it provides unified access to lots of LLM models. Currently, it supports Perplexity (great for web searching), Claude 3 & 3.5 from Anthropic (fast and currently my favorite), as well as the GPT models from OpenAI, Llama, and Mixtral.
The recent update also allows me to drag and drop images, PDFs, and more into the chat for further context or analysis.
📝 Fix Spelling and Rewrite Things
No one’s perfect, especially with commas and such. One can highlight text in literally any app, run “Fix Spelling” and let it make suggestions. I can either copy what I need or paste the whole block back into the original app.
There are also lots of presets for “Change tone to {Casual, Professional, etc.}”. The great thing, in my opinion, is the ability to customize them all. Raycast comes with lots of presets out of the box, but they can all be edited. You can edit the prompt itself, along with the creativity and model settings for full flexibility.
❓ Talk to a Website
When they announced the plugin for Chrome-browsers I didn’t think this would be as useful. I was wrong. It is super helpful to give the AI chat context and then ask things.
If I have a super long article and just want the highlights before (or instead of) reading it, I can run “Summarize Website” to use the browser context for a TLDR overview.
The only downside (so far) is that Google’s Gemini AI models are not available in Raycast. I use them super often, since they can fully access YouTube and summarize or describe YouTube videos. I hope this will be available in the future.
📎 Snippets
The ability to create snippets is fantastic for recurring blocks of text that one needs every day.
!dayreturns me the current day in ISO format (2024-01-01), which is super useful for file names, notes, etc.!logreturns the basicconsole.log()and positions the cursor right inside the brackets!!logprovides quick access to our custom logging wrapper for JS!shrugtypes¯\_(ツ)_/¯- …and even more shortcuts for text snippets that are often being used
Using ! as a prefix is my choice, you can literally set any keyword you like.
🔍 Search NPM
I always found npmjs.org to be painfully slow. Having this extension allows me to search for packages from within Raycast and then open the correct link in the browser if I need to.
👍 The Smaller Bits
- My Schedule: Quickly see the upcoming calendar events or even join meetings directly from the app.
- Positioning Windows: No, not Windows the OS, but actual app windows. Left half? Right two-thirds? Fullscreen? Everything is so quick.
- Translate: Quickly translate words or text between multiple languages or with LLMs.
- Money: How much was $200 in Euros again?
- Conversions: What is 6ft in the useable (I mean metric) system?
- Quicklinks: Kind of like bookmarks, but browser-independent and quickly accessible by typing.
- Store: There are so many extensions for all the popular apps like Linear, Notion, Arc, etc.
The only minor issue so far is that I’d love their main window to be slightly larger. Especially on a 5K monitor, it could be just a tad bigger to make larger text blocks easier to read.
🚀 Getting Started
It is also worth mentioning, that Raycast is a fully native macOS app, while the extensions by other developers are written in JavaScript/ TypeScript and can communicate back and forth with the UI. This makes the app feel super snappy and responsive.
If you want to give it a try: Go to Raycast.com and click Download. They also have a 14-day Pro trial in the app to test out all the AI features.
The list of all extensions is available on the /store page or contribute yourself on GitHub raycast/extensions. You can also explore common snippets on ray.so/snippets, AI prompts on ray.so/prompts, or presets for the AI chat on ray.so/presets.
Also, shoutout to their hype squad on Twitter and YouTube for content and tips about using the app.
(this post contains affiliate links)