How I Use Raycast, Part 1

An Excellent Tool That Transforms My Workflow

Once, during a Spanish lesson with my teacher, she shared her screen, and I noticed Raycast in her application launcher. Curious, I asked how she used it and was surprised to learn she used Raycast solely as a translator.

I showed her some of Raycast’s amazing features, like clipboard history and other productivity tools. She was incredibly impressed by what I demonstrated and excited to learn more. This experience inspired me to write this blog post. I want to share Raycast's benefits with people everywhere.

Having such a high-quality, fun, and user-friendly tool is a blessing. It feels like magic when software does what you want, even things you never imagined. This inspiration drives me to spread the word about Raycast, encouraging as many people as possible to explore and use it to its fullest potential.

I want to share my experiences and use cases that make Raycast a vital part of my daily work. It makes all interactions with my laptop incredibly efficient. With this tool, it takes just a split second from thinking about an action to implementing it.

Snippets

I have a text snippet that I can type like “qm” and that text transforms to my mobile phone. The same for email: “qp“ is for personal email and “qw“ is for work email. This is shared with my iOS text replacements and works the same on my mobile.

Speaking of my programming-related tasks, I’ve set “hg“ to be replaced with “history | grep “, allowing me to quickly type it in any terminal, whether local or on a remote host when using SSH. Other examples include:

• “;log” for “console.log()”. You customize your snippet to place the cursor inside brackets.

• “;tn” for “// @ts-nocheck”

• “;ti” for “// @ts-ignore”

The same concept applies here. These snippets work across different environments and applications (VS Code, CodeSpaces, Chrome DevTools). I can switch my tools and environments and never think of these things — I always know they are with me.

There are a couple of other useful snippets not related to programming:

• inserting date (“;dd”) or date + time (“;dt”)

• “;ml” is used to paste the markdown link. It takes whatever is in your clipboard right now as a link. Notice how my cursor is placed automatically when pasting the markdown link. Full snippet — [{cursor}]({clipboard})

Finally, my favorite one for Slack: Did you know you can send a message with + and an emoji (like this +👍🏼), and it will add the emoji to the latest message? I use “;k” → “+👍🏼” and “;eye” → “+ 👀”.

Quicklinks

Everything you need to access quickly can be a Quicklink in Raycast. Open frequently visited links in the browser, open project folders in your favorite IDE or Terminal, jump to your loved Spotify playlist and use queries to perform searches on Google, Dribbble or other websites. The best thing is that you can access it directly from within the root search.

I don’t use browser bookmarks; I use Quicklinks instead. Everything I frequently need to open, like links to application logs or Jira boards, is Quicklink. Here are some specific examples.

Translation

I use Reverso Context as my daily tool for learning languages.

I have it in all combinations because you never know which word I will remember first in which language.

More on how I learn Spanish:

How I approach learning Spanish

Work-related

Jira

Basically, there are two types of commands: specific board quick links and shortcuts to specific tickets. For the latter, I can type the ticket number in the query and open the specific ticket. For example, https://orgname.atlassian.net/browse/AA-{Query}.

I also have Quicklinks for opening specific epics and searching Confluence docs.

Other Uses

I use Quicklinks for frequently accessed links, such as:

• Application logs

• Monitoring systems

• Test environments

• Documentation

• Pending Pull Requests. Srsly set this one up — `https://github.com/pulls/review-requested`

Programming related

This is a common task when debugging a Node.js app or workers. To open the Chrome DevTools page (`arc://inspect/#devices`), I have a Quicklink set up for easy access.

arc://inspect/#devices page

I often search for npm packages, so I have it as Quicklink, which accepts a query parameter.

Fun stuff

I’m into TV shows and movies, so I often use Rotten Tomatoes to read reviews and decide if something is worth my attention. I’ve set this up as a Quicklink for easy access.

Clipboard history

This tool truly transforms the way you work with your laptop in many different ways:

• You no longer need a specific place to store temporary important info.

• When copying and pasting multiple items from one application to another, you can copy all the parts at once and then switch to another application to paste them one by one without switching back and forth.

• Whatever you have copied once is always there—searchable and retrievable.

• You can search for screenshots as well. No need to pile them on your desktop or whatever your folder is. You can even search for text within screenshots.

I suggest setting a global hotkey for this: ⌘ + ⇧ + V.

I want to put some GIFs here, but the raycast.com site demonstrates this part well.

Calculator

You can calculate pretty much everything you can think of:

• date time conversions — 21:45 - 13:52 is 7 hours 53 min

• currency conversions — 1 USD equals ₴39,25

• time zone conversions — 9am PT is 18:00

You also have a history of calculations

Search Menu Items

You can also search for menu items for any active application. For example, if you are in Apple Notes and want to export a specific note to a PDF, you can use Raycast’s “Search Menu Items” command instead of navigating through the top-left menu items. Simply type something like “PDF” to find it quickly.

This is just the first part for now. If you don’t use Raycast, I suggest you look at their site. It’s beautifully designed and clearly explains what Raycast is all about. They’ve done an excellent job showcasing its features and potential.

Your shortcut to everything.

I hope you install and leverage it to its full potential. Subscribe to read the next part!