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

  1. Disable Mac Spotlight
  2. Install Raycast as your launcher
  3. Configure keyboard shortcuts to match your workflow

My Keyboard Shortcuts

  • CMD + Space - Open Raycast
  • CMD + E - Emoji keyboard
  • Shift + 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

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