Guides And Tips• Published: Feb, 16 2025
Raycast Quick Guide
How to get 80% of the value out of Raycast with 5 minutes of set up.
Quick Guide to Raycast
A guide on how I use Raycast. You can get 90% of the value of Raycast just with the free plan.
I posted this guide on X if you prefer that format.
Essential Setup
- Disable Mac Spotlight
- Install Raycast as your launcher
- Configure keyboard shortcuts to match your workflow
My Keyboard Shortcuts
CMD + Space
- Open RaycastCMD + E
- Emoji keyboardShift + CMD + C
- Clipboard history
Key Features
Quick guide on how I use @raycastapp:
Bet this gets most people 80% of the value of Raycast. It's all free features too.
Fundamental Setup
- Disable Mac Spotlight
- Have Raycast open instead
- Adjust keyboard shortcuts to fit your flow
My Shortcuts
- Set CMD+E to be emoji keyboard
- Shift+CMD+C for clipboard history
- CMD+Space to open Raycast
Snippets
- Create snippets of everything you type repeatedly. Such as: code snippets, LLM Prompts, calendly links, addresses, terminal commands.
- I preface all my snippets with a "!"
Literally just watch for a day or two and every time you type something twice in a day make a snippet.
Raycast Notes
- I use notes as my daily scratch note. Mostly to check off todo items
Screenshots
- Just the best way to copy/paste screenshots into apps.
- This is way better than drag/dropping them. Makes it much easier to insert images into AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor)
- Changed the default screenshot location so it doesn't clutter my desktop. Raycast auto follows this
Clipboard History
- Just start using this and you'll get it. You can easily search through everything you've copy/pasted recently
- Supports great fuzzy search
Emoji Keyboard
- With the shortcut set this is 100% of my emoji usage.
- Also has great fuzzy search for the intent of an emoji
Timers
- Just good quick timers.
App Launcher
- Core feature of Raycast probably doesn't need to be mentioned. But it's just the best way to open up apps on your mac.
- Even if you have the app open, this works as a switcher instead of CMD+Tab