Become a Mac keyboard ninja with Raycast

5 days ago 1

16 Apr 2025

Ever since I had my first Windows desktop, then a Windows laptop turned into a Linux laptop, then a Linux laptop running Hackintosh in a VM, then a Mac, I've always been heavily reliant on keyboard shortcuts. I just don't have the patience to move the mouse and wait. I need keyboard shortcuts for switching apps quickly, managing my clipboard history, and automating repetitive workflows.

I have bought and used many productivity apps over the years: Paste, ClipBot, Maccy, ClipMenu, HyperDock, Keyboard Maestro, Alfred, Bartender, Contexts, Karabiner, and others I can't remember... but Raycast beats them all with excellent execution and native macOS UI/UX packing tens of features in just 1 app.

Here are my daily drivers.

Switching apps

I use Raycast to switch between apps instantly. Every app I use daily is just 2 key presses away:

⌥S Safari
⌥G Chrome
⌥T Terminal
⌥V VS Code
⌥C Calendar
⌥H Things
⌥M Apple Music
⌥D DaVinci Resolve

Alt shortcuts are rarely used by apps because they normally map to special characters (which I never use anyway), so the alt key is much more useful as an app launcher.

You can configure these by going into Raycast settings where you can record a hotkey for any app:

Clipboard history

Weirdly, macOS still doesn't have a built-in a clipboard manager, which is crazy because this is such a useful feature that I now can't live without.

I like to use Alt+Cmd+C to show the clipboard history. To search, you just start typing. Then you use keyboard arrows for navigation, Enter to paste, and Cmd+P to filter by type (text, image, etc).

Suddenly, copying lines of text from one app to another, or any snippet, or finding that phone number you copied yesterday, becomes so much easier.

And you gain new super powers:

saving things like a URL, note, or any text in your history by just copying, knowing you'll find it later if needed (fuzzy search FTW!)
whenever you submit a form in a browser, you can Cmd+A to select all and Cmd+C to save a copy just in case the page crashes and loses your data
search for text in screenshots/images you copy (Raycast automatically does OCR for you)

I like to keep a long history of 6-12 months, but lately that has slowed down Raycast, so my clipboard history only spans the past 3 months now.

AI chat

There are so many "native" AI chat apps, however most look and feel so gimmicky. Raycast's AI chat is simple, elegant, and truly native.

While you sadly can't add your own models, and sometimes it takes a few days for them to add the newly released flagship models, they do include a good variety of LLMs from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others. The rate limits do get in my way sometimes (50 messages per 3 hours, AFAICR), which is extremely annoying (just charge me a bit more!), but I can just go to chatgpt.com in that case.

I have, of course, set a keyboard shortcut for it too: Alt+Cmd+G.

Screenshot 2025-05-07 at 14

Having support for vision models comes in really handy. Web search is handy too, but way too often it gets in the way. Many times the LLM's approximately-correct answer is good enough, I don't want to wait for search — it sorely needs a keyboard shortcut for quickly disabling it.

Raycast is experimenting with AI extensions, however these only work with their own model Ray-1. When they add MCP support with Claude 3.7 Sonnet Thinking, it will be a game changer in productivity.

I can't wait to have an LLM assistant that can combine all these actions to achieve tasks on its own:

read and write todos in Things
modify calendar entries
search and edit notes in Bear
run Terminal commands
use Safari for me

Everything supervised, of course.

Quick note floating window

I frequently use the floating note as a scratchpad, launched with Cmd+Alt+Q. I don't use their new note management because I already have Bear for notes, I always just simply use it as a temporary writing place.

Emoji picker

macOS has a built-in emoji picked, but Raycast's is better because it looks nicer and has search. I configured it with Ctrl+Cmd+Space to replace the macOS built-in emoji picker.

Screenshot 2025-05-09 at 16

I use this for searching unicode symbols too, e.g. ellipsis, star, arrows, dots, etc.

Translate

I enabled the translation widget with hotkey Alt+Cmd+T. Super handy to quickly fire up, paste, and get a translation. You can change the languages with Cmd+P and Cmd+Shift+P.

Screenshot 2025-05-09 at 16

Self explanatory!

I use my calendar to track my time a lot, even events that are not scheduled or have meetings. I like seeing the current event's name in the menu bar. Raycast even launches the meeting automatically for me, which is handy for recurring events like a daily sync, and makes it easy to be on time.

Screenshot 2025-05-09 at 16