My summary of Raycast before using it — Raycast is a productivity tool, making it easy to search, launch programmes and run tasks.
How does Raycast explain itself in the first minute?
“Supercharged productivity” is Raycast’s key promise on their website. “Raycast is a blazingly fast, totally extendable launcher. It lets you complete tasks, calculate, share common links, and much more” is the sentence that follows this promise. Raycast is a launcher app specific to the Mac.
How does Raycast work? Raycast is a launcher, meaning that you can use it to launch applications on your Mac. Instead of using the MacOS launchpad or spotlight to search for an app, you can use the Raycast action panel as the hub for all your frequently used apps and actions.
Raycast has a number of extensions built in; functionality like calendar and file search comes out of the box in the Raycast action panel. Raycast’s store offers an array of additional extensions that you can access directly from your Raycast command bar. Extensions like Chat GpT and GitHub can be installed from Raycast’s store.
To launch Raycast, you can either use a hotkey or make it the default command bar by replacing MacOS Spotlight.
There are several hotkeys that you can use to run commands fast. For example, if you often use the Center Command from Window Management, you need to open Raycast, search for Center and press ⏎. if you want to speed up the Center command, you can create a Hotkey like ⌃ ⌥ ⌘ C. Once the hotkey has been create you can press ⌃ ⌥ ⌘ C from anywhere on your computer to trigger the Center Command.
Another way to launch an action is through ‘aliases’. For example, if you often use your Spotify player, you can create an alias for your command. You could then assign f as an Alias to the Spotify Player command. You can now type f followed by a space and your search query.
Main learning point: Raycast offers a way to easily find and launch your apps, and introduces a new way of launching commands through its hotkeys and aliases.
Related links for further learning:
