My Raycast set-up

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I have noticed that I have become borderline obsessed with my tools and set-up lately. It’s been a while since I’ve been this excited by software. And Raycast gets me Oprah-levels of excited.<br>Raycast can be either underwhelming or intimidating. You could easily think it’s just a differently flavored Spotlight. Or run for the woods when confronted with its feature list.<br>If the Holy Ray of Light is ever in need of disciples, consider me an evangelist. Some readers will attest: I have definitely been doing the nudging of friends and colleagues.<br>Which is why I thought it'd be interesting to do a quick rundown of why Raycast has become indispensable for me. Seriously: in a world without Raycast, I would quit my computer entirely.<br>A modest introduction to Raycast<br>For Hannes, who is walking toward the light.<br>And Dries, who chooses to remain in darkness.<br>Essentials<br>Every trooper needs these in combat.<br>Launcher<br>Obviously, Raycast is a launcher. It does launcher stuff. Launching apps, finding things. It’s a calculator, a conversion tool, and so forth.<br>If you insist to live without a launcher, there’s no point to keep reading. But question your life decisions.<br>Exactly what you would expect. A small step up the ladder towards the Light is using Quicklinks. For example: [video] opens a Finder folder with video assets I need often, [banners] opens a Figma file with email headers I kept forgetting where to find. Quicklinks supports dynamic placeholders (like including a search query), but I am not that advanced yet.<br>Clipboard manager<br>A lot of our job is moving text around, especially now with AI. Somehow, I had been living without clipboard history. I couldn’t anymore.<br>This really is something I use all the time. It’s set as a favorite, so when I open Raycast I just [↓ + ↩] and boom.<br>An exclusive look into my past five minutes of computer use.A small aside: similar to copy-pasting text, moving screen grabs around is also a big part of the busywork nowadays. I use Shottr as a screenshotting tool [⌥ + S], often immediately using the built-in OCR functionality (⌘ + O) straight after.<br>Windowing<br>In the same vein as the clipboard manager: a lot of work is looking at two different windows while moving said stuff around. AI is a lot of multi-tasking. Again, there’s great window management tools (like Magnet), but it’s also just very nicely baked into Raycast.<br>There’s something strangely intuitive to just typing [left half] and the window doing exactly that. But, more importantly, it’s also where aliases and especially hotkeys come into play.<br>Left and right. Here’s my stack:<br>[⌥ ←] & [⌥ → ] to neatly put two windows left and right side of the screen.<br>[ ⌃ ⌥ ← or → ] to move windows between displays.<br>[⌥ :] for ‘almost maximise’, which is an oddly pleasing alternative to having an app fill your entire screen.<br>Anyone else feeling slightly claustrophobic when working on just your laptop screen? This, on the contrary, is nice and breezy. Calendar<br>Simple, but effective. Linking your calendar to Raycast means upcoming meetings will appear in your Raycast window. Joining a call is as easy as hitting ↩.<br>Important meeting coming right up. (You can have Google Meet-sessions open in Chrome.)Emoji picker<br>I am not too proud to admit I use emoji. Admittedly, like a boomer, but that is besides the point. I don’t know who built the default Mac emoji picker, but it never seems to actually work. Raycast’s alternative just does. It also allows you to set aliases for those fuckers you never remember by their official names.<br>Snippets<br>Again, something that exists, but I had not bothered with before I converted to The New Church of ⌘ Space. (Probably because Mac hides this seven-settings-screens deep.) Snippets are simple text replacements. Here’s a few examples and ideas for good triggers.<br>For email, this works for me: [fdb@me], [me@fdb], [f@cc], [ f@itp], etc. Trust me, you use your email addresses a lot.<br>For others, you don’t want to have to guess the keyword. But you don’t want them to trigger too often either. Some put a [;] before the name of their snippet, I just repeat the first letter: [ttel] becomes my telephone number, for instance, [vvat] my company number.<br>For managing everything around Computer Club, I have some very specific ones: [ccpurl] creates the url of episode pages (computer club podcast url). I use this maybe 3 times every week, but using snippets adds up.<br>Like Quicklinks, these support variables, but I haven’t found a use for this yet. (The use case they always demo: you select the sender of an email, pick a template to send as a reply, and the person gets added to the greeting.)<br>If you’re into that<br>These features depend on whether or not this kind of thing is your jam.<br>Quick AI<br>This is a Pro feature of Raycast. Now rest assured: Raycast is amazing as a free tool. But AI is part of the Pro suite, and simply hitting [⇥] in your Raycast and starting an AI chat feels like the right way to live....