a f*cking great product
Sums it up pretty well!, honestly raycast has been such an impactful addition to my arsenal of tools that I would go as far as to call it is an s tier piece of software.
daily use
I actively manage my relationship with my computer via commands/key-bindings and have almost stopped using the dock entirely, here are some of the commands that I use that give me the same happy feeling as sick ass chained alias commands in bash.
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First off, we have window management:
cmd | title | desc |
alm | Almost Maximise | set a windowed application to fullscreen with spacing |
tf | Toggle Fullscreen | enter or exist full screen. |
nd | Next Desktop | send or bring back a window between screens |
lh | Left Half | set window to left half of screen |
rh | Right Half | set window to right half of screen |
cen | Centre | centre a window |
ha | Hide all Except Foremost | minimise all windows except current |
qaa | Quit All Applications | close all active application |
qa | Quit Application | attempt to find application and close it* |
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Secondly, we have Spotify:
These are custom hotkeys that can be configured by:
extensions β spotify β record hotkey
cmd | title | desc |
β₯ P | Play or Pause | play or pause current song |
β₯ N | Next Song | skip current song and go to next on |
β₯ L | Like Song | add the current song to liked list |
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Lastly, we have the obscure extras:
cmd | title | desc |
cf | Colour Filter | run a mac os snippet that changes the screen to black and white |
se | Search Emojis | search and paste emoji into any application |
sd | Search Tailwind Documentation | search and open any tailwindcss documentation |
sc | Search Tailwind Colours | open and search though all tailwind colours, paste in HEX values |
CMD ^ W | Open Webstorm | shortcut to go directly to or open webstorm |
CMD ^ A | Open Arc | shortcut to go directly to or open arc browser |
CMD ^ P | Open Pycharm | shortcut to go directly to or open pycharm |
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custom snippets
Pretty much any use-case you could ever think of is achievable with customs scripts and an LLM, in the video below you can see my custom Quit Application script that attempts to find a running instance of an app with the best matching name as to that which you provided and close it.
source code
#!/bin/bash # Required parameters: # @raycast.schemaVersion 1 # @raycast.title Quit Application # @raycast.mode silent # Optional parameters: # @raycast.icon π« # @raycast.argument1 { "type": "text", "placeholder": "App name", "suggestionsCommand": "./quit_app.sh suggest" } # Function to get list of running applications get_running_apps() { osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to get name of (processes where background only is false)' } # Function to find best match find_best_match() { local input=$(echo "$1" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]') local best_match="" local best_score=0 while IFS= read -r app; do local app_lower=$(echo "$app" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]') local score=$(echo "$app_lower" | grep -o "$input" | wc -c) if [ "$score" -gt "$best_score" ]; then best_score=$score best_match=$app fi done < <(get_running_apps | tr ',' '\n' | sed 's/^[[:space:]]*//') echo "$best_match" } # Suggestion command for Raycast if [ "$1" = "suggest" ]; then get_running_apps | tr ',' '\n' | sed 's/^[[:space:]]*//' | sort -u exit 0 fi app_name="$1" if [ -z "$app_name" ]; then echo "Please provide an application name." exit 1 fi best_match=$(find_best_match "$app_name") if [ -n "$best_match" ]; then osascript -e "tell application \"$best_match\" to quit" echo "$best_match closed!" exit 0 else echo "No matching application found for '$app_name'" exit 1 fi
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ai and premium features
I have yet to use the paid version of raycast along with itβs ai integration, I am a daily driver of perplexity, claude and chatGPT. I currently use them all inside of arc but could imagine that being one step closer via raycast would be lovely.
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