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A Beginner’s Guide to Raycast

A Beginner’s Guide to Raycast

Raycast is one of my favorite tools. It’s a versatile launcher that makes it easier to do various things and be more productive. But it wasn’t until I dug around and watched some videos that I understood its full power.

I still don’t use Raycast to its maximum capacity, but here are some tools & commands that have been helpful for me — and that I wish I would’ve known about when I started using it.

To find any of the below tools, simply type in the name of the command into the Raycast launcher. If you can’t find it, it’s an external extension that you’ll need to download.

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Note: Some of these features (like Clipboard History & Raycast AI) are part of the Raycast Pro plan.
  • Clipboard History - Easily my favorite feature. Never lose something you copy-paste again. This would have saved me a lot of hassle before
    • I have it aliased to c
  • Raycast AI - Access the best LLMs with one hotkey
    • Command + Space + Tab for Quick AI to ask questions
    • Command + J (or any hotkey) to pull up the full Raycast AI window
  • Window Management
    • My hotkeys:
      • Command + ← to resize a window to the left half of my screen
      • Command + → to resize a window to the right half of my screen
        • Instant split screen
      • Command + M to make a window max size
  • Color Picker Extension - grab the Hex code for any color from anywhere
  • Emoji
    • I use this way more than I thought I would
    • I have it linked to Command + E
    • Comes with dingbats too
  • Floating Notes Window
  • Quicklinks - open any webpage super fast
    • I have quicklinks for pages that I visit frequently e.g. our homepage, core landing pages, Twitter, etc.
  • Currency converter: Type ___ [currency] to ___ [currency]
  • Time converter: Type “time in Tokyo” or “12pm UTC” to translate to your time
  • Figma File Search Extension
  • Create Issues in Linear
  • Year in Progress Extension is nice
  • Translate
  • Confetti for fun 🎉
  • TinyPNG image compressor extension is great

There’s definitely more that I haven’t listed but will at some point.

Have fun!

Other videos that were helpful

More rough notes

Recently started using caps lock as my hyperkey to open different apps:

Caps lock + A = Open Arc

Caps lock + N = Open Notion

Caps lock + S = Open Slack

Huge hack. Recommend using.