a love letter to raycast

a f*cking great product

Sums it up pretty well!, honestly raycast has been such an impactful addition to my arsenal of tools that I would go as far as to call it is an s tier piece of software.

daily use

I actively manage my relationship with my computer via commands/key-bindings and have almost stopped using the dock entirely, here are some of the commands that I use that give me the same happy feeling as sick ass chained alias commands in bash.

First off, we have window management:

cmd	title	desc
`alm`	Almost Maximise	set a windowed application to fullscreen with spacing
`tf`	Toggle Fullscreen	enter or exist full screen.
`nd`	Next Desktop	send or bring back a window between screens
`lh`	Left Half	set window to left half of screen
`rh`	Right Half	set window to right half of screen
`cen`	Centre	centre a window
`ha`	Hide all Except Foremost	minimise all windows except current
`qaa`	Quit All Applications	close all active application
`qa`	Quit Application	attempt to find application and close it*

Secondly, we have Spotify:

These are custom hotkeys that can be configured by:

🔥

extensions → spotify → record hotkey

cmd	title	desc
`⌥` `P`	Play or Pause	play or pause current song
`⌥` `N`	Next Song	skip current song and go to next on
`⌥` `L`	Like Song	add the current song to liked list

Lastly, we have the obscure extras:

cmd	title	desc
`cf`	Colour Filter	run a mac os snippet that changes the screen to black and white
`se`	Search Emojis	search and paste emoji into any application
`sd`	Search Tailwind Documentation	search and open any tailwindcss documentation
`sc`	Search Tailwind Colours	open and search though all tailwind colours, paste in HEX values
`CMD` `^` `W`	Open Webstorm	shortcut to go directly to or open webstorm
`CMD` `^` `A`	Open Arc	shortcut to go directly to or open arc browser
`CMD` `^` `P`	Open Pycharm	shortcut to go directly to or open pycharm

custom snippets

Pretty much any use-case you could ever think of is achievable with customs scripts and an LLM, in the video below you can see my custom Quit Application script that attempts to find a running instance of an app with the best matching name as to that which you provided and close it.

source code


#!/bin/bash

# Required parameters:
# @raycast.schemaVersion 1
# @raycast.title Quit Application
# @raycast.mode silent

# Optional parameters:
# @raycast.icon 🚫
# @raycast.argument1 { "type": "text", "placeholder": "App name", "suggestionsCommand": "./quit_app.sh suggest" }

# Function to get list of running applications
get_running_apps() {
    osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to get name of (processes where background only is false)'
}

# Function to find best match
find_best_match() {
    local input=$(echo "$1" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')
    local best_match=""
    local best_score=0
    
    while IFS= read -r app; do
        local app_lower=$(echo "$app" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')
        local score=$(echo "$app_lower" | grep -o "$input" | wc -c)
        if [ "$score" -gt "$best_score" ]; then
            best_score=$score
            best_match=$app
        fi
    done < <(get_running_apps | tr ',' '\n' | sed 's/^[[:space:]]*//')
    
    echo "$best_match"
}

# Suggestion command for Raycast
if [ "$1" = "suggest" ]; then
    get_running_apps | tr ',' '\n' | sed 's/^[[:space:]]*//' | sort -u
    exit 0
fi

app_name="$1"

if [ -z "$app_name" ]; then
    echo "Please provide an application name."
    exit 1
fi

best_match=$(find_best_match "$app_name")

if [ -n "$best_match" ]; then
    osascript -e "tell application \"$best_match\" to quit"
    echo "$best_match closed!"
    exit 0
else
    echo "No matching application found for '$app_name'"
    exit 1
fi

source code

ai and premium features

I have yet to use the paid version of raycast along with it’s ai integration, I am a daily driver of perplexity, claude and chatGPT. I currently use them all inside of arc but could imagine that being one step closer via raycast would be lovely.