I’ve written quite a bit about Raycast in the past. However, I don’t know if I’ve written very much about how I use it, or why I find it so useful. One of my favorite features is basic fallbacks and quicklinks. Fallbacks are what display after you’ve typed a few words and Raycast doesn’t find what you’re looking for (after searching for apps, etc.). This is how I use the app to search everywhere else. Here’s my current setup:
The first fallback is just a basic Google search. This is the default way I search Google. And since I use xSearch in Safari this becomes a super powerful way to search a bunch of different websites with ease. I can type “ch blink-182” and it’ll search Chorus automatically for me. Or “az Mark Hoppus book” to search Amazon. Or any of the websites I have setup in xSearch:
I also have a fallback to directly run the search in Google Chrome instead of my default browser, Safari. There’s also a file fallback so if I am looking for a specific file and I didn’t launch the file searcher with a keyboard shortcut I have quick access to it. There’s some other handy fallbacks as well, like the dictionary, translator, and bookmark search. But the other fallback I’ve found myself using quite a bit, and one of the other awesome features of Raycast, is the quicklink feature. Quickinks let you open files, URLs, or paths instantly. I have one set to “drop” to open my Dropbox folder. I have “app” to quickly open the Applications folder. And quite a few others:
The Ask ChatGPT one is a recent addition. Raycast has basic AI features built into the app and their pro features let you expand to other models. For basic questions using the built in features is nice. Hit Command-Space and type a quick question, hit Tab, and get a basic AI reply. Simple. I have their AI chat “window” mapped to Option-Command-Space for longer chats or when I want to type a longer prompt. I don’t pay for the pro version of Raycast’s AI feature set for a few reasons. First, because during my testing I was getting worse, and slower, responses using the same models on their default apps or websites. Second, I like having my chat history with me on mobile and Raycast doesn’t have a mobile app. So, instead, I use ChatGPT’s service. They have a nice and capable Mac App. It even has a built-in keyboard shortcut feature where you can pop open a little window to ask it questions. However, I don’t really want to run the ChatGPT app all the time. It’s, currently, not an app I have in my Dock or running throughout the day. Raycast’s basic AI handles those queries for me. But there are often times when I do want to send a question directly to ChatGPT. If I want to quickly launch the app I can use my hyperkey for it (which Raycast now also supports), but the quicklink fallback lets me just start typing when I have a question and then decide where I want to send it (Google, quick AI, or directly to ChatGPT). And you can map quicklinks to keyboard shortcuts themselves. So, if I use Option-Space I get my custom ChatGPT quicklink query:
Type the question, hit enter, and it gets automatically populated in the ChatGPT desktop app. The mechanics of this are simple:
This just fits how my brain works. I like to have one app as the central “control” for doing a whole bunch of things on my computer. This then just becomes muscle memory for me to do things quickly with the keyboard. From quick file searches, to adding events to my calendar, to adding a quick note in Drafts, to adding a reminder to pre-heat the oven for dinner, to running more complicated searches, all the way to using various AI tools. At this point Raycast has also become my emoji picker, clipboard manager, TextExpander, quick gif search, and color picker.
I’ve liked other launchers in the past. Alfred was my favorite for a long time. But I haven’t loved one to the degree that Raycast has cemented itself into my every day workflow like this. I think it is now to the point where sitting down at a computer without it would feel broken. Rarified air.