My favorite feature is Floating Notes, and for a very particular reason.
I take a lot of screenshots. Anything I come across that I find useful or interesting — whether it be a quote, code snippet, website, or explanation — I just press ⌘ ⇧ 3
. No need to find a place for it in Logseq or some other notes/reminders app right now; as long as I take a screenshot and save it to my Desktop, I can revisit it later and file it appropriately. This way I don’t have to interrupt my flow whenever I feel like jotting something down.
So where do Floating Notes come in? Sometimes, I’ll want to add additional information to go along with a screenshot — maybe the full website domain so I can find it later, or a quick blurb about why something is useful. Floating Notes let me do that by jotting the information down on my screen before I take the screenshot. It’s made my process of knowledge collection that much more efficient.
Additionally, thanks to the Search Screenshots feature, I can even use Floating Notes to “tag” my screenshots. I’ll just write “french” or “js” or whatever else is relevant in my Floating Note, and Raycast will pick it up when it indexes the text content for the search feature.
System commands like Restart, Eject All Disks, and Quit All Applications are useful to have within reach.
Window snapping commands get a lot of use. My favorite is Center, though I also use Left/Right Half a lot.
I’m learning French, and I created quicklinks to my two favorite dictionaries (WordReference and Wiktionary).
I use Apple’s Reminders for most of my todo needs, so the Create Reminder command is handy.
Honestly, I’d have an easier time listing the commands I don’t use frequently.
Aliases:
vs
ss
rem
wi
wr
Hotkeys:
⌥ Tab
Additionally, I use BetterTouchTool to create key sequences which map to keyboard shortcuts, which in turn launch Raycast commands.
For example: if I type jjn
, BetterTouchTool converts that to ungodly ⌘ ⇧ ⌃ `
, which Raycast picks up as the hotkey for “Toggle Floating Notes Window” I do this because I wanted to map the command to an easy-to-type key sequence without needing to worry about overriding application shortcuts.
This is undocumented, but ⌘ 1
through ⌘ 5
switches through Floating Notes colours. I felt pretty smart when I discovered that.
Download the Raycast app and start taking your productivity to new heights.
macOS 12+