How I Use Raycast

What's in My Raycast

I've been using Raycast for over a year now, and it has become an indispensable productivity tool for me. The official team has released a series of videos on YouTube called "What's in ___'s Raycast," showcasing how designers and developers use Raycast. I'd like to share my own experience.

Launcher

Powerful Fuzzy Search

First and foremost, Raycast is a launcher — the core of "Your shortcut to everything." The key to this is having powerful fuzzy search capabilities. Raycast offers robust fuzzy search that's friendly to both English and Chinese. In contrast, macOS Spotlight search is not only slow but also doesn't support fuzzy searching by pinyin initials.

In Raycast, this works effortlessly:

Even for custom Quicklinks in pure Chinese, Raycast still supports fuzzy searching by pinyin initials:

App Launch and Hide

I set keyboard shortcuts for apps I frequently need to summon/hide. Raycast has an excellent mechanism — when you set a shortcut for an app, pressing it will have different behaviors:

• If the app isn't running → Launch the app
• If the app is running but not the active window → Bring it to the foreground
• If the app is running and is the active window → Hide the app

This creates a very convenient workflow: press the shortcut to summon WeChat → send the message → press the shortcut again to hide WeChat → continue working.

Extensions

Apple Reminders

My most used and favorite extension. The Quick Add Reminder command allows for quick reminder creation with natural language input and AI-driven parsing. Just describe the reminder content, and AI automatically fills in information like date, time, recurrence, list, and priority.

Change Case

When coding, I often need to convert between different string formats — kebab-case for file names, PascalCase for components, camelCase for functions. This extension helps me convert between formats easily.

Window Layout

macOS window management has never been great. Raycast's window layout feature lets us pre-define layouts for daily work, set up specific applications, and even make apps open links or Quicklinks:

You can instantly return to your work state with one keystroke:

AI Command

Raycast's AI Command is its biggest killer feature. It integrates AI more tightly with the system, allowing AI to better blend into specific workflows.

AI Translation Tool

For example, creating an AI translation tool:

Text Processing

Besides translation, there are repetitive tasks that can be handled by AI. For example, adding sequence numbers to multiple lines of text:

AI-Generated Git Commits

We can go further — having AI analyze git diff results to automatically generate compliant Git Commits. The principle: create an AI Command, copy its Deeplink, then run: git diff | pbcopy; open raycast://ai-commands/git-commit-message.

Conclusion

Raycast has become an indispensable productivity tool for me. It has changed how I use my Mac, with excellent aesthetics and user experience. Looking forward to iOS and Windows versions.