Raycast

Recently I discovered Raycast as a replacement for macOS’ app launcher Spotlight. At first sight it seemed to be a slightly enhanced, faster version of Spotlight (app launcher) with a few more functions. But its features go far beyond just searching apps, files or looking something up on Wikipedia.

It is definitely one of my favorite productivity tools and so many of my workflows or tasks have become more efficient using Raycast, that I decided to write a short blog post about it.

Built-In Tools

In addition to searching and quickly opening macOS apps, Raycast comes with a powerful calculator, floating notes, system commands, window management (like Magnet), calendar overview (including quickly joining a meeting), clipboard history and even a global text expanding/snippet feature (like TextExpander or Rocket Typist).

Extension Ecosystem

Thanks to Raycast’s JavaScript API’s and React components + the built-in extension store it is super easy to build, publish and install custom extensions. That’s why there already is a decent amount of extensions that boost productivity (especially for developers).

For example it’s possible to create Github/Gitlab issues and Todoist tasks or search Unsplash stock images right from Raycast without the need of opening the corresponding app or website. You can even control your Philips Hue smart home devices, Spotify or Apple Music player, etc. You’ll find a list of great developer extensions that I use below!

Teams

I haven’t used the teams functionalities of Raycast yet, but this definitely should be mentioned as well. Raycast teams features include employee index, shared brand assets, bug reports and shared quick links and snippets throughout the team. You can find more details on the team features here.

Extensions

Here is a list of great extensions I discovered so far:

• Deepcast - quickly translate selected texts into different language with DeepL
• Gitlab - access Gitlab (including self-hosted) repositories, issues, MR, etc.
• Github - same but for Github
• Hue - control Philips Hue smart home devices easily
• Iconify - search many free icon sets
• Craft - search notes from the Craft app
• Google Fonts - choose google fonts and copy their HTML/CSS import code with a few key presses
• Unsplash - search free stock images
• Web Converter - quickly convert web units (like rem, px and pt) to each other
• HTTP Status Codes - look up HTTP status codes (I am working with API's for almost 10 years and still often have too look some codes up… 😄 This comes in handy as well)

If you’re a developer or "power user" and working with macOS you should definitely take a look at Raycast (or even develop your own extensions for it)! Check out their (very nice) website here: raycast.com