Beginner tips for Raycast?
When @Raycast launched their recent notes feature, I downloaded it for the first time. I'd heard a ton of great things, but just hadn't ever tried it out before. Their notes feature was something I'd been looking for so it seemed like a good jumping on point.
So far, I feel like I'm vastly underutilizing it though. I kind of found the sheer amount of things you can do with it overwhelming, and I've mostly found myself just not using it. I love keyboard driven apps and shortcuts (I'll forever be a diehard @Neovim fan) so it seems like something I'd love and get a lot of use out of. I just haven't found a great set of shortcuts or uses yet.
For any Raycast masters out there, what am I missing? What are the most impactful and useful shortcuts to set up and start using? I feel like I just need a couple of good use cases to "get it" and start using it in my daily workflow.
Start with the basics:
Clipboard history (number one for me)
If you're already using an app for that, get rid of it. Or at least turn off launch at login and see if you ever miss it
Snippets - same as above
Quicklinks - I use these primarily for sites that can take search string in a url parameter. Quicklinks support taking selected text as input so I create these "quick searches" that I assign keyboard shortcuts to and then trigger these most frequent queries by selecting text anywhere and then pressing the keycombo.
Raycast will url encode the selected text for you automatically.
You can set up similar functionality in any browser most likely (at least chromium based) BUT it does not come close to this.
Most importantly you can launch the websearch from anywhere and you don't even have to be in your browser app at the time.
Btw I feel you, I sometimes get the same feeling about me underutilising this awesome tool. But I think the beauty lies in its ability to save you the most time with the most basic features. 80/20...
Just use what makes sense for you and once you have a new workflow you want to streamline just remember to look for solutions inside raycast first.. 🙂
Wireframe Components Kit
@podles ++ on this. Start with the basics and you'll learn more as you get used to it, and want to do more with it.
Another good thing to try is search for extensions in the Store for apps that you use on a regular basis (search for Store and hit enter). For example:
GitHub extension
Arc extension
Apple Reminders extension
If you upgrade to Pro, that's where you really get to leverage the AI features as well.
Hope that helps!
Product Hunt
@podles @megaroeny These are great tips! I've mostly kind of skipped over the store so I'll definitely have to take a look there for the apps I use most.
I really like the Quicklinks suggestion. There's a lot of use cases I can think of for that.
I somehow missed the Snippets feature completely. I'm a huge fan of that feature in @Superhuman . It'd be really cool to have that functionality in other places.
This definitely gives me some great ideas to get started! Really appreciate the suggestions!
Bucket
Product Hunt
I wonder if @chrismessina has some pro tips!
@rajiv_ayyangar you could start here... :)
Product Hunt
@rajiv_ayyangar @chrismessina Definitely seems like a great place to start! 😁
It will depend on your context, but me being a programmer I use heavily every day the following:
VS Code Extension:
1. Opening the folder/file where I'm in finder by just doing CMD + Space and write code.
2. Search for Projects instead of having to search them on the finder.
Focus:
This one is pretty new and has helped me a LOT to get focused at worked. Once you start a focus session that is customisable, you can allow raycast to close apps and open them when session finishes. AMAZING.
Raycast Notes:
1. I use a note to be my Daily Work Log.
2. With AI Commands I can summarise what I did during the week.
3. I have an AI preset that helps me structure chapters from a book, challenges me to see if I understood the concepts and then adds the chapter summary to my "second brain" document where I'm summarising a book.
4. Works as a brain dump for anything.
AI Chat:
1. With presets you can easily switch on what type of AI you want, like a "Chef" or "Programming Buddy" etc.
2. Quickly having a chat with AI by using a shortcut.
AI Commands: (These are powerful)
1. Fix spelling and grammar of what I have in my clipboard.
2. Translate what I have in the clipboard to whatever language you want.
3. Create your own custom ai commands (like the one that read a raycast note a summarises my week)
Windows Management:
Comes with shortcuts to easily arrange windows
Store:
Tons of extensions that are pretty useful, for example one I use everyday is the Github extension to see my pull requests on the menu bar.
Calendar extension allows you to set the next meeting on the menu bar.