General Tips

• Just install Raycast and start using it for Google Search/AI; the best way to improve Raycast is to learn and customize it over time

• Don't get intimidated by advanced use cases; it takes time to memorize and take full advantage of Raycast's features

• Begin to familiarize yourself with the Raycast Settings window

• Start disabling commands you don't use by selecting them, using the Action Menu via CMD + K and then Disable Command

• Change the Pop to Root Search preference to your liking in Advanced Settings

• If you are using your mouse, you're doing it wrong 😉

Default Search

• Reorder, enable and disable Fallback Commands using Manage Fallback Commands

  • tl;dr: Enter = Google Search and Tab = AI model of your choice

• Customize your Quick AI models in settings

Snippets

• Anything you find yourself typing a lot you should create a snippet for such as your email, phone #, address, calendar link, etc.

• Check out Explore Snippets for useful suggestions

• If you mistype something often, you can use a Snippet to force autocorrection of it

• Add snippets for you favorite emojis (Example: I use /sal for 🫡)

• You can use dynamic placeholders to leverage more complex snippets and even recursive snippets

Quicklinks

• Create Quicklink will autofill if your active window is a web browser

• You can use dynamic string inputs that will auto encode for URLs

  • Example: Search your past tweets with https://twitter.com/search?q={Query}%20from%3A0x_Osprey&f=live - replace 0x_Osprey with any username

Default Extensions

• Clipboard History is absolutely amazing and you won't know how you used your Mac without it

  • Lots of useful functionality in the Action Menu of each item such as Save as Snippet and Save as File

• Switch Windows allows you to quickly search and switch to any active application/window

  • This has entirely replaced Cmd + Tab for me

• Window Management allows you to quickly shift your windows around

  • I hotkey Move Left and Move Right and also use Rectangle for dragging windows to portions of my screen

    • It has a lot of over granular commands on by default (ie Bottom Center Sixth) so disable those if you don't use them

• Search Menu Items (Deeplink) allows you to use text search for the Menu bar (including nested items) of your active application/window

  • I personally prefer this as it has replaced a lot of app specific hot keys I used to have to memorize and rebind

  • Examples:

    • In VS Code, I can hit my hotkey and type Terminal instead of using my mouse to find the option

    • In Chrome, I can hit my hotkey and type History to open my history

• Emoji Search allows you to quickly search emojis

  • It also was recently updated to include AI search functionality

    

Store Extensions

• There is likely an extension for the popular apps you use

• My most used are: Linear, Notion, Spotify Player, Toothpick (Bluetooth Switching),

• Underrated Extensions

  • ScreenOCR: Extract text from screen captures

  • Coffee: Prevent the sleep function on your Mac

  • Color Picker: Pick and organize colors on your Mac

  • Meme Generator: Generate memes with the help of Imgflip API

  • Temporary Email: Quickly and easily create a temporary email

  • CoinGecko: Get crypto data from Coingecko (price, ticker, ranking)

  • Youtube Downloader: Download YouTube videos

  • Remove Background: Remove background from image with the Mac Vision API

• You can make custom extensions and install them without needing the store

  • See Banteg's EIP extension that I use even though it's unpublished

  • Raycast also allows for really easy creation of Menu Bar Commands

AI Commands

• My most used is an Executive Summary command that will quickly summarize any webpage I'm looking at using the {browser-tab} dynamic placeholder

• Install the Raycast Browser Extension so that these commands can use the text on your browser as an input

• Use the Explore Prompts (Deeplink) feature to find various premade prompts

Scripts

• There is a public repo with popular scripts that you can download (audit and use at your own risk)

• Here are a few of my custom scripts. Note that they may require application or library installs to function properly:

  • Parse and Open: Automatically parse and contextualize your clipboard

    • Example: Will open up Etherscan if you have an Ethereum address or transaction hash copied in your clipboard

  • ETH Price: Retrieve and copy the current ETH Price

  • Spongebob Text: TuRn yOuR ClIpBoArD TeXt iNtO SpOnGeBoB MeMe fOrMaT

  • Rewind Twitter Search: Opens a search for your tweets from 1 year ago

  • Shorten URL: Shortens a URL in your clipboard

  • Telegram Search: Searches and opens Telegram chats

The End

Thanks for reading! Feel free to use my referral link and try Raycast Pro! Tag me on /raycast if you have questions!