WWW… Wednesday! Raycast

by Taylor Slattery | January 17, 2023

For many of us, keyboard shortcuts have become an integral part of how we use and interact with our tools. They may take some time to get the hang of at first, but quickly become second nature, enabling us to accomplish relatively complex tasks in a fraction of the time without ever needing to touch the mouse. The best part is, the power of keyboard shortcuts compounds the more you learn. From simply copying and pasting type or quickly saving our work, to custom complex actions programmed to run at the press of a key, keyboard shortcuts hold the potential to drastically speed up our workflow, helping us to accomplish more in less time.

Raycast is a fast, lightweight launcher that makes nearly every corner of your machine accessible through your keyboard. While a similar feature is already available natively to macOS users in the form of Spotlight, Raycast really takes things to the next level via its extensions which can be used to expand its functionality. Raycast’s large and growing library of extensions makes it possible to do things like searching for songs on Spotify, using Google Translate, and creating pages in Notion from directly within Raycast itself.

While Raycast can certainly help you to access your recreational media at record speeds, it’s not just for play. Raycast can be customized to better match your needs for work purposes as well, with handy extensions for designers and developers alike, allowing you to do things like monitor your machine’s performance on the backend, generate Lorem Ipsum placeholder text, or search for stock images on Unsplash. Raycast is also open source so you’re free to tinker with the API and new extensions are being added to the marketplace all the time.

The Raycast API makes it possible to even further customize the tool to match the way you and your team work. Integrated developer tools make it easy to create custom-tailored extensions which can be shared exclusively with your team via private extension stores. Quicklinks make it possible to share all the necessary project documentation with members of the team, including snippets, which house commonly used text. These can be used to standardize the sorts of language used in customer-facing communication or save time by storing frequently used chunks of code.