Maybe stop smiling for a second. [LAUGHTER] Look at him laughing. [MUSIC PLAYING] Hey, everyone. In today's What's in my Raycast?, we have Thomas, the CEO and
co-founder of Raycast itself. I'm really excited to
find out how he uses Raycast, because being the co-founder, I would imagine that he's the
biggest pro user of Raycast. Thomas, welcome. Yeah, welcome. I'm here with my tea. I'm ready to show you around. Feel pressured when
I prepared for the video. I felt like, OK, do I use Raycast enough? Do I miss some features? What do I don't adopt? So quite curious to show you. And maybe you teach me something as well. Yeah, actually, I was about to say, I wonder if by the end of this video, maybe you could learn something from me. Maybe I can teach you something. I hope so. Let's find out. Let's start off. As the CEO of Raycast,
what I'm curious about first is how do you normally use your Mac? Oh, wow. So that's sort of
the table stakes, right? So I think I have
this mix of different works. So there is a part
where I work with on the product, where I actually code stuff. So classic developer things using VS Code or Xcode,
depending on what to do. And then there is a different bucket, which is more like the
CEO work, the communication side. So a lot of emailing,
slacking, being in Notion. So all of the content work, essentially. And then the third
bucket, working with you, Pedro, and everything that
we're putting out on the content. So being a lot in the browser as well. Yeah, so I imagine
that one of the reasons that you
co-created Raycast is specifically to optimize some of your workflows that you've been using your Mac for. So without further ado, why don't you share your screen with us
and show us what's in your Raycast? Let's do it. So the first thing I use Raycast on is jumping between
different applications. So how I do that is I
have hotkeys mapped to my most frequently used applications. So for example, I have
⌥ N, which opens Notion. So I can jump straight away in here. There's a proposal that
we're reviewing at the moment. And then I have those
hotkeys pretty much set up for all the other apps that I'm using. So I have ⌥ A to open up my browser. And then I have ⌥ X
for Xcode, and so on and so forth. So I usually use ⌥ and
the first letter of an application to open that. The other thing
when I worked, like a table stakes on me is window management. What I do often is I
have one window on the left, another window on the right. Or I use this window
and put it into the center or make it full screen. So I have hotkeys
for all of those things. So that's sort of like
how I navigate around my Mac. The fun thing is you
haven't seen Raycast yet, right? So I use all of that just the hotkeys because those are
interactions that I do so frequently that it's actually quicker
for me assigning hotkeys and do that. Is there a logic behind your hotkeys? How do you rationalize the
hotkeys to the window management commands? I need to look actually on my keyboard because it's such a
muscle memory that I don't remember the exact keys. But what I do is I have
^ ⌥ as my modifiers. And then I press ←
to go left, the right arrow key to go right, ↑
and ↓ to basically go between the halves. And then with the
same modifier keys, if I do C, it centers it. If I do ↵, it makes it full screen. And then actually just
recently, Pedro, I got this from you is I use plus and minus
to make the window a bit bigger and smaller, which I quite like. So if I have a nice
window size, I can just fine adjust it a bit. For all the other
things, I basically have oftentimes aliases assigned. So this is my Raycast setup. The first thing that
you see here is on the top I have a few favorites. And those favorites are
kind of like giving me information that I oftentimes need. So the first one is team time. You basically see the
different team time zones that we have. The second one I
have is like year in progress. This is a simple
extension that I built like a while ago. So it's a bit like a
motivational boost for me, meaning like, OK, now it's just 30% left. We better get going. And then the last one here is this one is connected to our HR system, Bob. And it shows me
basically who is off today. As a CEO, is there any
commands that only you have? Yeah, no, I'm not that special. So all the commands like
we have the Raycast symbol here, they're basically shared internally. So every Raycast
employee has access to them. So everybody can see
who's off today or the team time. We have also here an
extension to post our weekly updates. So every Monday, we
post what we're working on. So this is just a little
extension where you can post stuff. This is my debug version
because I did some changes last Friday on it. And then you can
basically post what you did last week, what you're going to do this week, and can just notify
and broadcast information to the team on the Monday morning. But then there is one specific thing that also every employee has
is like we have an internal build. So this build is
getting built every night. So every day, we
get an update as an employee with the latest
features on our main branch. So this allows us
to continuously dogfood and allows us to
make continuous improvements. So we have a few things
like, for example, a camera command that I'm working on at the moment. So hopefully, we're
going to ship that one soon. That is also
marked as an internal command, so meaning that's
only accessible for employees at the moment. And then at some
point, we're going to publish that and make it available for everybody. Another thing that
the I use Raycast a lot for is hotkeys for changing the volume. So I use an external
keyboard, a mechanical one, which doesn't have
buttons for volume up and down. So what I have here is I basically have volume up, which is,
again, mapped to a combination. So I have in here ⌥ ⇧ ↑ to make something
louder and ⌥ ⇧ ↓ to set the volume a bit down. And I have the same
also for things like lock screen. So I can quickly lock my screen when I go for lunch or something like that. One thing that changed for me over time while I was using
Raycast are menu bar commands. So before, I always
had to pull information. But there are some
things which make menu bar commands a lot easier. So I used a menu to stay on top of stuff. So a simple one is
here, the weather menu bar. I just see what's the weather right now. I can see a little bit of a forecast. Just gives me a bit
of an overview of the weather this week. And then the
others that I use are Linear. So here I can see
all my unread notifications. So it's extremely helpful
for me to just keep an inbox zero. So I see Nichlas
completed here, some designs. So I can follow up on that later. And then the other one,
which I certainly need to clean up, is having here 50
notifications around GitHub, a lot of them in extensions, land
where I'm oftentimes a reviewer. So I try to stay on top of that. But I need to get better at this. I got a spicy question for you. Is there anything
that you used to do in Raycast that you no longer do it? Well, that's a tricky one, let me think. So there are some
things that changed due to my work that I do less often. So when I was coding, what
I did, for example, oftentimes, is I used commands to show the history. So I have here
commit history, so I can quickly jump and see the commit
history of that file on GitHub. Or if there is something
which I'm not so super familiar with, I can, for example, say, OK, what's that? And I search, I think, GitHub code. And you see, I
can't even find it anymore, because I don't use it that often. Yeah, it's this one here, basically. So I have here a
hotkey, which is ^ ⇧ C. So if I select this
term and I press ^ ⇧ C, it opens, basically,
GitHub and searches straight away for what I had selected. So here I see, OK, mtl, ⌘ Q. And I can dive into and figure out finding open source
code that maybe helps me solve one problem. But I haven't used it in a while. I just got a bit rusty with that one. The other one, which
I used to use quite often, was Google Search. So I have here, actually, a quick link for searching Google. And I'm right here, like,
it's a Google Search command as well. Funnily enough, since we have Raycast AI, I find myself searching a lot less. So I just use Quick AI for that. So for example, if I want to know who are the founders
of Raycast, I can go in here. So it gives me straight away the answers. I don't need to go to Google. It's a bit of a sneak peek. So we're working on
bringing references into Quick AI as well to make,
basically, real-time information as well accessible in Raycast. So since we have that internally, I find myself using
Google less and less often. So especially for those quick questions, I pop in very often in Quick AI instead of opening a Google Search. AI in Raycast has become super powerful. But I'm curious, what
else are you using Raycast for? Yeah, so I have a few things. So one, I use it as a coding assistant. So I'm still fairly fresh
in working TypeScript and React. So I don't know all
the things all the time. So I have, basically,
here my extensions assistant. So I gave it a bit of information. So I use low
creativity to get precise answers. And I said, hey, you're a great developer and helped me to
build Raycast extensions. All questions I ask are
for React, Node, and TypeScript, which is what we use for extensions. So in the chat
here is just an ongoing chat where I ask questions from time to time how I get help with something. Another thing that I use every day is the fixed
spelling command, the AI command. So I use that all the time. I'm not a native English speaker. So it helps me a lot to just correct these little grammar errors that I have. And actually, I feel
like also when you're fixing it, you kind of see the changes. And at least for me, it
helps to learn those changes. So I feel like I'm
getting better over time. Something that I have often to deal with is people trying to
sell something to us in Raycast. We're not really big fans of that. So what I did, I
created myself a little AI command. I still try to reply to all
of these emails just to be nice. So I have here Decline Email. You also see Decline Fundraising. It craps just basically my selection and just gives me like a brief thing. Thanks for reaching out. I appreciate the offer, but I'm not interested
in pursuing it at this time. Just like a nice phrase. So I can just copy that and then say, ping, reply, paste it in, send. And then I can carry on with that. This is by the way,
how the AI command looks like. So it just takes the selection. I give it a bit of instruction. So I say, hey, decline the email. So I'm not interested for now. And then use a casual
tone of voice, keep it brief. And then just like,
give me the rewritten text. - I got another spicy question for you. If you could change
anything about Raycast right now, if it was easy, what would it be? - Well, nothing is easy, but... otherwise we
would have done it, right? I always wonder if our window is too big and if we should make it
a bit narrower, a bit smaller, just like especially on smaller Macs, it feels like sometimes huge. We have the compact mode, right? Which is a different
representation of Raycast. But I like having the full window and I always wonder if it's too big. But then if you make it smaller, well, people want
to have even bigger fonts, which we don't offer. So it's a bit of a tricky thing. So I'm curious like
what others think of it. Is the size good? Is it too small, too big? Do you want to have a setting for it? Don't know. - I was also thinking about workflows, like end-to-end workflows, rather than just one
thing that you do in Raycast. - One workflow that
I actually do very often is searching for a Linear issue that I want to keep a comment on. So I know there
was something with past due where we finished the design. So I can say, add comment. And I can say, looks great. And then what we
have is the inline one here. So I can just give it a nice emoji, send it, edit my comment, and can close Raycast again. Another one which I really use, which you kind of riffed
on, was the search screenshots. So again, like we had something where we basically had past due. So I know I made a screenshot here. This is from Linear. I made a screenshot
how they visualizing it. So I can quickly find it just by text and then I can copy that and paste it. And send it somewhere. (upbeat music) - So basically we're
gonna start our Extension Rapid Fire, right? Where I ask you a bunch of questions related to extensions and you just got to
answer as quickly as possible. - Let's try it. - Cool, so first one,
which extension do you use the most? - Linear. So I use it in the menu
bar to check my notifications. I use it all the time
to create issues wherever I am. And I use it to stay on
top of my issues to close them. And there is a bit of a fun fact. So when we started Raycast, one of the first
extensions we built was Jira. We didn't use Jira, we used Linear. So we couldn't use this extension. So at some point I
was so frustrated of it that I over a weekend
hacked together the Linear extension. Initially just for creating issues to get first a sense of it. And then it grew to like
a fully fleshed out extension. And then just
recently we made it open source and converted it to the API. So this is something
which you see very often in Raycast. Like we build something for ourselves and then it evolves
over time to something bigger. - Which extension
blew your mind the most? - Snake. (upbeat music) - What's the
favorite extension that you built? - I think I like Color Picker the most. It's just a little fun one, bit quirky. So you can use the Color Picker globally. And select the color of a pixel. And then it can paste it somewhere else. - Your favorite extension for Teams? - For our team, I
think it's Weekly Updates. It just makes it
very easy for new joiners following straight
away our rhythm of weekly sprints essentially. So every Monday you just
write what you did last week, what you do next week. There is a form that you
fill out and then you're good to go. - And if you could
only keep one extension, which one would it be? - Oh God. That's a tough one. I think Spotify, I use it all day long to search for what I listen next, to toggle, play, pause, to like songs, all of those kinds of stuff. So I would definitely miss this the most. - If anyone
watching this video is interested in coming on and showing everybody else how you use
Raycast, leave a comment below and we'll get it penciled in. All right, Thomas,
so what else do you think people should check
out on our YouTube channel? - Definitely the
playlist about Quick Tips. There is a ton of stuff
that you can learn from there, more coming. And if you really wanna know it out, join our community on Slack as well.
