Ever since I tried Raycast a few months ago, I've sworn by its usefulness in my day-to-day. It started on macOS, but it has since expanded to Windows in an official capacity, and to a lesser extent, to Linux thanks to the Vicinae project. macOS is still where I use it the most (because that's where I spend the most time), but it's incredibly helpful on all my machines.

While a lot of that comes from the simple fact that I can quickly launch my apps or put my computer to sleep before I get up to take a break, Raycast's extension platform has also replaced a few tools I used to have to install or open separately.

The emoji picker

I use them more often than I'd like to admit

I've talked about this one before, but the emoji picker is something I use fairly frequently on my PCs. Windows and macOS have one built-in, but it's fairly clunky. Searching for a specific emoji takes time, sometimes the panel itself takes a while to appear, it's just far from ideal. Meanwhile, Linux usually requires me to download an emoji picker separately, which is even worse.

The emoji picker in Raycast (and Vicinae) is frankly perfect. I can summon it with a quick keyboard shortcut, it appears instantly, and it shows me my most used emoji right away. I can easily navigate the list with the keyboard or, if I want something I use less often, I can start typing to find what I want. I don't need to know the official name of the emoji each time, either, it can often find results for "close enough" terms. It's so easy to use and I absolutely love it.

Clipboard history

Getting a little more serious

On a similar, but more practical note, the clipboard history in Raycast is one of my absolute favorite features it offers. Windows has had a clipboard history for a while, but until macOS 26 Tahoe, Macs did not. In fact, when I wrote about the apps I was using to ease my transition from Windows a year ago, I mentioned an app called Pasty, which is what I was using for my clipboard history.

But having this in Raycast makes things even better. Aside from having it all in a unified UI, I can still use a keyboard shortcut to bring it up instantly, much like the emoji picker, it's very easy to navigate or search my clipboard entries so I can use them. This is huge for me.

If you're subscribed to the XDA email newsletter, you may have noticed the little blurb advertising our Google News page. Well, I actually insert that every time by bringing it up from my clipboard history. I copied it for the first time back in November, and I've never had to do it again because Raycast saves my history for a long time, and across sessions. I just open Raycast's clipboard, type in "Love XDA", and the entire piece of text is right there. It's perfect.

A video downloader

Sometimes I need to save YouTube clips

When I make videos for my personal YouTube channel, I sometimes reference other YouTube videos, or borrow game footage from others who might have captured things I couldn't. Before Raycast, the way I did this would have to be either using a dedicated website (which can be shady) or a program such as Persepolis to download those files.

But Raycast has made things easier by bringing a search and download solution straight to the universal search bar. I can combine the YouTube extension and the video downloader extension to do everything in the same place. The YouTube extension lets me search for videos and channels, and I can either open them or just copy the link directly to my clipboard. Then, I can open Raycast again and launch the Video Downloader extension, which automatically grabs the link from the clipboard and shows me the available formats to download.

This does require yt-dlp and ffmpeg to be installed, which handle downloading and encoding the video in the background, but it's still great to have this integrated solution. Unfortunately, Vicinae on Linux hasn't got this working quite right, but the official Raycast on macOS and Windows both support these extensions.

Media converters

Getting the formats I need

It's not uncommon for me to download images in formats that are hard to work with when I need them, as much of the web these dyas forces me to download files in WebP or AVIF formats. Before, I would need a file converter to make some of these images usable in my editing software, and that got old quickly.

Raycast greatly helps with this in two ways, especially on macOS, thanks to built-in media converter extensions. I actually have two installed just in case, but I especially appreciate one called Image Modification, because it can actually pick up data from Finder. What that means is that if I open Finder and realize a file has the wrong format, I can just select that file and then launch Raycast, and the extension automatically loads that selected file to convert. It only converts to JPEG or PNG, but when I quickly want to make an image file usable, it's perfect.

I have another extension called Media Converter, which has much more broad support for image and video formats, but requires me to manually select files to convert each time. Both of these save me a lot of trouble converting files, at least if I'm not particularly worried about optimizing the settings for maximum quality each time.

Task Manager

Part of it, at least

Alright, maybe you can't replace the entirety of Task Manager with Raycast, but I know as well as anyone that 90% of the time someone opens Task Manager, it's to terminate a process that's frozen or stuck. And for that purpose, Raycast can absolutely replace Task Manager, or whatever method you might use to do that on macOS.

Right off the bat, if you want to quit an app that's unresponsive, Raycast offers the option quit or "force quit" said app. Just search for the app, press Ctrl+K (or Cmd+K on macOS) and look for those options in the menu. They also have dedicated shortcuts, if you want to learn them.

If that's not enough, there's the Kill Process extension on the Raycast store, which lets you search running processes and see them sorted by CPU and RAM usage, and then terminate them from there. On Vicinae for Linux, there's an extension called Process Manager that does pretty much the same thing.

Bonus: My browser (sometimes)

A huge time saver

I obviously can't say Raycast actually replaced my browser, but there are some websites or specific tasks it did replace and I think they deserve some spotlight. The biggest one has to do with online meetings in Google Meet. Normally, when I have a meeting coming up, I would have to open my calendar or just go straight to the Meet website at the right time to launch the meeting, but I have to remember to do that.

Raycast integrates with my calendar, and whenever I have an online meeting coming up in 5 minutes or so (and for a couple of minutes after it starts), that meeting is the top result shown in Raycast before I start typing. All I need to do is summon Raycast and press Enter and it instantly takes me the meeting link. It's sped things up very significantly for me.

Another set of websites I visit a lot less are those dedicated to Pokémon, thanks to the fantastic Pokédex extension in Raycast. This is oddly just missing information about evolution methods, but I can find Pokédex descriptions, in-game locations, and information about what moves a Pokémon can learn all within Raycast (or Vicinae), and it makes my life a lot easier when I'm playing a Pokémon game.

Raycast is a huge time saver

With all of these things combined, on top of the basic functionality of quickly launching apps, Raycast has sped up so much of my work, and it's an essential tool for me to be able to keep up with everything I need to do. Even beyond my work, the efficiency it brings never stops feeling fantastic. I highly recommend everyone check it out, and if you're on Linux, try Vicinae as well.