I have a bad habit of checking out apps a lot. This probably doesn't come as a surprise given how I've written about my tech stack and also change it constantly. But that bad habit doesn't always feel so bad when I come across an app that actually straight up changes the game for me and how I interface with my personal and professional work. [Raycast](https://www.raycast.com/) falls into that category, having now tested it for the past few days. It's one of those things that feels so good it may as well be integrated into the operating system it was created for. As I set it up, I kept going "ooh," and "aah," and getting excited like the silly aah nerd I am about its possibilities. It's neat and I like it a lot. **Raycast** is, at its core, a shortcuts app. You know Apple Spotlight, that thing that seems neat but that you keep forgetting to use? **Raycast** is that, but really really worth using. When you hit your preferred shortcut (I use ⇧⌥R myself), it activates a launcher. What does the launcher do? Literally everything, from what I can tell. I have been able to use it to: - Add and look at tasks in my to-do list app **TickTick** - Skip and add tracks to my library in **Apple Music** - Look at my calendar events and join meeting links for work - Engage with **Obsidian** in so many ways I have to add it all to this sublist: - Append to and open my daily note - Make a new note - Search through my notes and media - Open my bookmarked notes - Scroll through and post in **Bluesky** without going to the app - Search and download YouTube videos - Search through Wikipedia and Kagi - Use a calculator - Especially fun - you can add numbers to dates too - ![[Raycast-1740607165699.png]] - Expand text snippets - Ex: `@@` now automatically writes out my address, `@T` automatically types out the URL of this website, etc. - Pick and manipulate colors - Add, search, and open **Raindrop** bookmarks - Search my clipboard history - And a bunch more, but I feel like this list has gone on long enough On top of all that, you can assign separate shortcuts for every action you can do in **Raycast**. For example, If I want to append something to my daily note in **Obsidian**, I can hit ⇧⌥D, open Obsidian itself with ⌥O, open my daily note with ⌥D. ⌥M opens **Apple Music**, ⇧⌥W opens up my Wikipedia search bar, and so on. Now, I fully understand that this might not excite most people. Again, I am a broken person. But! It's still fun to me. I love being in a flow state because of my terrible [[ADHD]]. The minute I let myself slip out of that state, I'm cooked. I am about to go look at the history of the Hoptimist[^1] for four hours. So I am always looking for tools that keep me in the flow. I can tell that **Raycast** will be extremely good at keeping me in that flow state. Now when I want to go to the next track in **Apple Music**, I can just use **Raycast** and prevent myself from scrolling through all my albums for the 80th time to find something new to listen to, just because my dumbass brain says so. When I want to add some note to **Obsidian** while I'm scrolling through a page or just have a stray thought in the middle of doing something else, I can hit my shortcut and append it to the end of my daily note, then keep it pushing. I can complete a task I'm working on in **TickTick** without going to the app itself and getting overwhelmed by all the other stuff I gotta do that day. Again, these things may be easy for you to just...*do*, but for me that is simply not the case. I like **Raycast** so much that I'm legit pissed it's not ready for Windows yet. I want to use it on more than just my work Macbook. It's not all good, though. **Raycast**, like most apps, is pretending like ["AI" is at all valuable or useful](https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-ceo-admits-ai-generating-123059075.html). They're extremely dumb for that. The trend feels inescapable, and I can't wait for the bubble to burst. Luckily for us, all of the stuff I mentioned I used **Raycast** for is completely free. If you're willing to spend your hard-earned money on its AI features...well, what's that thing they say about a fool and their money? So yeah. I love **Raycast**. It's nice. It might not be nice forever, because capitalism makes everything bad. But this year, when my brain is melting and the world is on fire, I plan to indulge on things that are nice. If it sounds useful to you, check it out. :) [^1]: It was developed in the late 1960s by Gustav Ehrenreich! I love mine. It's orange.