Switched to Raycast as the primary launcher from Alfred. Before Alfred, I used LaunchBar.

There is so much power packed in the free version of Raycast to increase your productivity that it is almost criminal to give it away for free. Combine that with free community extensions, it is equivalent to several other apps bundled into a super compact, easy to use app.

Software like Raycast is what makes Macs shine.

Table of Contents

• Notes
• Apps that Raycast made redundant for me
• Extensions installed
• Extensions to check out
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Aliases
• Snippets
• Quicklinks
• Raycast AI
  • Available models
  • From other users
• Compared to Alfred
• Downsides/bugs/issues
• Resources

Notes

• To install: brew install --cask raycast. I installed using the dmg.
• Turned off Spotlight’s keyboard shortcut in the past in Mac settings. The default keyboard shortcut for Raycast is ⌥␣. Changed it to ⌘␣. Demoted Alfred to ⌃␣.
• Set up right ⌘ to press ⌘␣ using BTT.
• ⌘⎋ to escape to the main search page and ⌘W to close at any time.
• ‘Calculator History’ command to see the history of all calculations and conversions.
• Assigned cal alias to ‘My Schedule’.
• You can use natural language to specify your file search! A couple of examples:
  • Searching text files in a certain folder .txt in ~/Desktop
  • Search for PDF files with “certificate” in its name .pdf certificate
• Fuzzy search works. So we could simply type the first letters of commands like ss for Search Snippets, Search Screenshots etc.
• Screenshots search includes OCR.
• Begin typing Hide All Apps Except Frontmost: to concentrate on the frontmost app and hide all others.
• To create a snippet, the command is ‘Create Snippet’.
• To install an extension, begin typing the ‘Store’ command.
• Didn’t find 1Password extension useful. Disabled it. It keeps asking me to sign in using TouchBar almost every time and that too twice in succession every time 🤷
• In the Quick Add Reminder, we can specify repeat frequency like ‘every day’ and list name in natural language. Not sure if this needs the Pro version. I upgraded to the Pro w/ Advanced AI.
• Installed CleanShot X extension but disabled it since I am used to ⌘⇧3, ⌘⇧4, and ⌘⇧5 .
• Made Google as the first fallback command.
• Window management frequently used commands:
  • Maximize
  • Almost Maximize
  • Restore
  • Center Three Fourths
  • Center
• To bring up the emoji picker when typing within Raycast’s config windows, type :
• It is possible to pass arguments to existing commands that accept text input using deeplinks. See this.
• Any images in the clipboard history or Show Screenshots command can be annotated with CleanShot X using ⌘⇧X.
• Turned on ‘Expand within Words’ to ensure that if a snippet’s keyword is typed immediately after another, it gets expanded. Ex.: ⌘⇧
• Sample snippets for importing: https://snippets.ray.so/symbols.

Apps that Raycast made redundant for me

• AppCleaner
• ColorSlurp
• Gestimer
• Lungo
• Paste
• Unclutter

Extensions installed

1. Arc: mainly to open URLs incognito
2. Apple Notes
3. Apple Reminders
4. Battery Health
5. Brew
6. Change Case: works on selected text
7. Coffee
8. Color Picker
9. Easy New File: Quickly create file in the current Finder window or on the desktop
10. Dash
11. Format JSON
12. GIF Search
13. GitHub Gist: Generated a fine-grained token here. Granted user permissions to gists.
14. Google Maps: https://d.pr/i/JdgZfq
15. Hacker News
16. Iconify: disabled since there are too many sources to choose from and am not sure which is the general go-to
17. Image Modification
18. IMDB
19. Installed Extensions: Command is ‘Search Installed Extensions’
20. Lorem Ipsum: To copy 3 paras to the clipboard, type L, tab, 3 and ⏎
21. Messages
22. Password Generator
23. Placeholder: for images
24. Pomodoro
25. Random Data Generator
26. ray.so: for creating beautiful images of code
27. Remove Background
28. Remove Paywall
29. Ruler
30. ScreenOCR
31. Search MDN
32. Speedtest
33. Spotify Player
34. SVGO: For optimizing SVGs
35. Timers: added menu bar icon
36. TinyPNG: for compressing and downsizing images
37. Todoist
38. Twitter
39. Twitter/X Video Downloader
40. Unix Timstamp: Convert between unix timestamp and human-readable form date
41. Unsplash: not working for me
42. URL Tools: for encoding and decoding
43. Visual Studio Code
44. Word Count
45. YouTube Downloader
46. Quick Event: Create a calendar event using natural language
47. Quit Applications
48. Zoom

Extensions to check out

• Authy
• Bitwarden
• Daily Log
• DevUtils
• PastePlain
• PromptLab

Keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard shortcut	Function
⌘⇧G	Google
⌘⇧N	Floating notes
⌘⇧S	Search snippets
⌘⇧V	Clipboard history
⌘⇧/	Search menu items
⌘⌥D	Search selected text in Dash
⌘⌥G	Search selected text in Google
⌘⌥N	New Bear note
⌘⌥P	Pick color
⌥A	Arc
⌥E	Search emojis & symbols
⌥F	Finder
⌥J	AI chat (set in AI tab of Settings)
⌥M	Spark mail
⌥P	Path Finder
⌥R	Quick add reminder
⌥S	Search screenshots
⌥V	Visual Studio Code
⌘⌥←	Left half
⌘⌥→	Right half
⌘K	To change the selection in popups like raycast-interface.png
⌥⇥	Switch windows

Aliases

Alias	For
cal	My Schedule
f	File search
fn	Floating notes
n	New Bear note
p	Play/pause Spotify
s	Search Bear notes
yt	Search YouTube

Snippets

Name	Snippet	Keyword
Last but one clipboard item	{clipboard offset=1}	;cb
CSS Grid	%root% {<br>display: grid;<br>grid-template-columns: repeat (3{cursor}, minmax(0, 1fr));<br>}
Email us	Please email your site's WP admin login to support@brickslabs.com so we can take a look and troubleshoot.<br><br>https://wordpress.org/plugins/temporary-login-without-password/
Today’s Date	{date format="d MMM yyyy"}	;td
Left Arrow	←	;la
Right Arrow	→	;ra
Up Arrow	↑	;ua / ;up
Down Arrow	↓	;da / ;down
Command	⌘	;cmd
Shift	⇧	;shift
Option	⌥	;alt / ;opt
Control	⌃	;ctrl / ;control
Enter	⏎	;ent
Space	␣	;sp
Escape	⎋	;esc
Backspace	⌫	;back / ;del
Check/Tick	✓	;chk / ;tick
Middle Dot	·	;dot
Copyright	©	;cr
Trademark	™	;tm
Shrug	¯_(ツ)_/¯	;shrug
Pretty print PHP array	echo "<pre>" . print_r( {cursor}$arr, true ) . "</pre>";
Bricks dynamic data in WordPress block editor in a HTML block	<p><span>{</span>{cursor}echo:fn(arg)<span>}</span></p>
Bricks Query Results Count	{query_results_count:{cursor}}	;qrc

Quicklinks

Quicklink	URL
Search Google	https://google.com/search?q={Query}
Search Google Images	https://google.com/search?q={Query}&tbm=isch
Search YouTube	https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query={Query}
Today’s Notes in Bear	bear://x-callback-url/search?term=%40last1days
Bear notes from the last 7 days	bear://x-callback-url/search?term=%40last7days
Search selected text in Dash	raycast://extensions/RSO/dash/index?fallbackText={Query}
Search Mac Power Users (MPU Talk)	https://talk.macpowerusers.com/search?q={Query}%20order%3Alatest
Search Bricks Academy	https://academy.bricksbuilder.io/?s={query}
Search Bricks Forum	https://forum.bricksbuilder.io/search?q={query}%20order%3Alatest
Plugins	~/Documents/WP/Plugins

Raycast AI

• Has 3 components: Quick AI, AI Chat and AI Commands.
• The default Quick AI Model in settings is GPT-3.5 Turbo. Changed it to Sonar Medium.
• Press tab on the root search for quick AI or to access the result of the last AI command.
• New chat: ⌘N.
• To toggle the sidebar in the AI chat: ⌘⇧S (this isn’t going to work for me because I set it to bring up Snippets).
• To search previous chats: ⌘⇧F (for searching by chat content) or ⌘P (for searching by chat titles).

Anthropic models: Claude 3 Opus, Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Sonnet.

Available models

• Recommended by Raycast for Quick AI:
  • GPT-3.5 Turbo
  • Claude 3 Haiku
• Sonar Small
• Sonar Medium
• GPT-4
• GPT-4 Turbo
• Claude 3 Sonnet
• Claude 3 Opus
• Llama 2 70B
• Mixtral 8x7B
• Code Llama 70B

From other users

We mainly recommend using the Perplexity Sonar models in Quick AI as they are optimized for question-answer scenarios and not multi-turn conversations.

– Thomas of Raycast

I use the following setup:

• Quick AI: Perplexity Sonar Medium
• AI Chat: Anthropic Claude 3 Opus
• AI Commands: Depends, but mostly the built-in ones

by Thomas of Raycast

I found them more fluent, so I enjoy Claude for some copywriting.
(referring to Anthropic)

Thomas of Raycast

Absolutely loving Mixtral 8x7B for coding work. It’s just so fast

For Quick AI, I use Haiku as it is optimal for this task in terms of speed and quality of responses. For AI Chat, I mainly use GPT-4 Turbo and Opus.

Sonar Medium for Quick AI

Opus has better reasoning and is more conversational. Tbh, I find even Sonnet better than GPT-4 Turbo.

I will start. I find Perplexity is great for Quick AI. GPT 4 Turbo is well rounded. Opus is sophisticated but slow.

I’m really liking the suggested Sonar Medium  for quick AI. Very zippy and so far has had great responses for those quick/short questions.

In my experience, they are the best for coding tasks
(referring to Anthropic models)

Compared to Alfred

• More consistent UI and UX
• More keyboard-centric
• Better and larger 3rd party extensions ecosystem

Downsides/bugs/issues

• Not possible to pass text/file/folder from anywhere in the system like webpage/Finder/Trickster to Raycast as input. Hence also using Alfred for its universal actions incl. “Open with..”. To upload a recently captured screenshot to Droplr, for example, I press ⌃Z to bring up Trickster, press ↓ arrow in the Trickster window to select the file (if it’s not the latest file), ⌘⇧O (custom keyboard shortcut – o to open), begin typing Droplr in Alfred and hit ⏎. The beauty about this is we don’t have to define custom shortcuts per app to pass that to Alfred to further pass it to any app. It’s just a single shortcut. Alfred’s Universal Actions. Also see this. LaunchBar’s Instant Send is even more epic!
• Poor file management and directory browsing compared to LaunchBar and Alfred.

Resources

• 24 tips to get started
• https://csswolf.com/how-to-chain-multiple-commands-in-raycast/
• Mastering Raycast: A Deep Dive into Features, Extensions, and Comparisons by Felix Vemmer
• One interface, many LLMs
• LLM Leaderboard
• Prompt Explorer by Raycast