Raycast Extensions I Use
Part of the Raycast series
Introductionum
Recently Niléane of MacStories wrote about the Raycast extensions she uses in Adding to My Mac’s Swiss Army Knife: A Raycast Extension Roundup - MacStories. I learned about a couple good ones that I wasn’t aware of, but I also thought I would list Raycast extensions I use here, along with a little bit about why for each of them.
The Listium
So here they are in alphabetical order-ish:
I actually underutilize this one. It allows for opening items in various ways (in 1P or in a browser), generating passwords, and more, but I’m so familiar with 1Password’s own keyboard shortcuts that I forget about the Raycast extension.
This is a really outstanding extension that lets you prepend or append text to whatever’s on your clipboard with a pre-specified separator. It sounds like something I should use all the time. I’d actually forgotten I had this one installed. 🤦♂️
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before – here’s an extension that sounds really useful and I just don’t use it. But I should! Checking for new mail, composing an email, sharing finder items to mail, seeing recent or important mail, these are all possible with this extension. I think with most of these it’s a matter of building muscle memory.
I actually have used this extension! The Apple Reminders extension lets you use natural language to set reminds, in addition to allowing you to view and complete them.
Hi, Homebrew users! Want a quick way to see what you’ve installed with Homebrew, or search for and install new formulae and casks? You can do so from wherever you’re at in macOS with this extension.
I use this extension all the time. Capital Case, camelCase, lower case, PascalCase, snake_case, UPPER CASE, and more… select your text and have at it. I love this one.
I just started using this one today. It effectively locks your keyboard until you type ^ U (Ctrl+U) to unlock it, in order to allow you to clean the keyboard without deleting your home folder or sending an obscene message to your boss.
I’m currently a heavy CleanShot X user and this extension has a ton of useful CleanShot X commands, but once again… the old muscle memory. If you picked up on the fact that I’m primarily writing this article to benefit myself, you win the prize of knowing how insightful you are.
I use this all the time to clear formatting from items in the clipboard. It comes in handy for certain things I have to enter into excel, for example. Yes, you can tell excel to paste in content only, but this is faster for me, and it’s also useful anywhere you need formatting removed.
I use ColorSlurp for color picking and therefore I use this extension to quickly launch it and grab colors, but truthfully I may very well switch to Color Picker instead. In fact, I’m doing it right now.
Oh, I love this one. For example, I just had a finder window with some pdfs in it open and I ran this extension and it gave me /Users/scott/Documents/BlueDragonfly/Sophos/ET15 - Sophos Central Endpoint Protection v5.0 - Engineer/ET15-Sophos-Central-5.0v5-Engineer-EN/01 Sophos Central Overview/ on my clipboard. You can’t beat that!
You ever look in crontab and see something illegible like */15 * * * * python3 /usr/local/sbin/scripts/wanipy/main.py --env prod > /dev/null and you can’t remember what */15 * * * * means? Well, it means run this thing every 15 minutes, and I know that because (well, I already knew that particular one) Cron Description told me!
I know I installed this for a reason, I just don’t remember what it was. Anyway, it lets you use curl to make an HTTP request, complete with custom headers.
I haven’t actually used this yet, but this one helps you create custom folder icons and apply them to folders you want to customize. It’s not something you’ll use every day, but it’s pretty cool.
Input a date string and then format it into any standard date format you like. It’s that simple.
If you’ve ever struggled with the CSS clamp function, you’ll like this one. You just enter your parameters, like min and max font sizes and min and max viewport sizes, and it’ll generate your clamp for you.
Another CSS helper. You can quickly copy an ease-in like cubic-bezier(0.55, 0.085, 0.68, 0.53); or you can create your own custom CSS transitions.
Lets you take JSON that’s not formatted nicely and indent everything properly.
Search for GIFs, favorite them, paste them in various ways to various targets.
Search and learn what different git commands do.
Helpful if you need to interact with GitHub using a CLI, this utility lets you search for commands and then opens the GitHub manual page for them.
Too many commands to list here, but it lets you work with GitHub in various ways. I guess that’s pretty self-evident.
This is for searching for repos on GitHub and quickly opening them (and really quickly opening repos you’ve visited before).
I primarily use this for searching Chrome history, but you can search bookmarks, open windows, search tabs, and more.
I have never used this. Maybe I should uninstall it.
This reminds you what all those pesky HTTP status codes mean AND gives you a cute cat to go with it. The internet was invented for cats. Don’t ever forget it.
Here’s a good one that I should really use more. Search for icons and get the svg source code.
I can see why I installed this, but I can’t see why I haven’t used it yet. This grabs web pages or YouTube videos and gets recipe ingredients from them for you.
If you’re thinking “I bet Scott used this extension to list what extensions he has installed”, you win a Ferrari!! I mean, someone else is going to have to provide the Ferrari. But I’ll let you win it if they’re willing to give it. 🤷
Clean those dirty links of yours, dammit!! Auto-scrubs tracking and referral crap off URLs for you.
Occasionally while mocking up some web idea I’ll toss in some Lorem Ipsum text, and this is a super quick way to do it.
I kind of installed this one because I could. I don’t think I’ve ever needed to use it. I use Markdown all the time but it’s pretty simple.
I like this one for letting me pop open a tiny calendar quickly and for also showing me upcoming calendar items.
I use Notion. I use Raycast. You’d think I’d use this extension. Truth is, I keep forgetting about it (again). I should at least use the search feature, that would save me some time getting to it in the Notion app itself.
This is actually kind of cool, but I never use this because I’ve created default browser script commands that I use all the time.
Here’s another one I have but never used. It looks like a way to open things in various apps depending on what the source link is, but… I have no clue.
I like this one. It’s just another way to get to things – I use it to create pins to Finder folders, mostly.
This lets you take various input sources and pipe them into a script command. You’d think I would use this all the time.
Grabs placeholder images from Lorem Picsum. Pretty handy.
A super useful extension for creating AI prompts to be used with Raycast AI.
Yep, another calendar extension, but this one just pops open a bigger calendar window to look at.
Um, I’m going to let you guess whether or not I’ve ever actually used this, but it’s for quickly creating calendar events.
This is a really cool one for quickly generating random dates, CC numbers, text, email addresses, and more.
Have not used. There, are you happy? This is for looking at various Raycast-specific icons.
I might use this more if 1.) I remembered I have it, 2.) I don’t hate Reddit so much. Does everyone there have to write like they’re 13?
I should use this more and see if it’s any good. I’m spoiled by BBEdit’s RegEx playground feature so I never do.
I’m not going to overtly state why I use this one, but I use it quite a bit. I don’t constantly end-run around paywalls on the same sites over and over. It’s for one-offs.
This is a cool one for measuring stuff on the screen. I used this the other day to make a screenshot of a certain form item on a web page vs. what the form item plugin thought the minimum width should be. Yes, I could have used the browser developer tools for that, but this was easier for the client to look at and instantly get the point.
Like its Chrome counterpart, I mostly use this for Safari history search, but it’s also good for searching tabs and the reading list (which I do use).
I don’t think I have ever used this because I’ve discovered the OCR reading shortcut in CleanShot X, but it is pretty cool.
I don’t really use npm for a lot these days because most stuff I script I now script in Python. I of course use npm with things like Astro, but I don’t need to search for anything for that.
This is a great one to use to make sure you’re using your podcast mic instead of the built-in laptop one or whatever else will pick up the cricket in your kitchen.
I don’t know. It looks cool, but I’ve never used it. I have Warp, what the hell, guys. Get off my back. 😄
A handy way to run the ever popular speedtest.net speed test.
Summarize YouTube Videos with AI
I keep meaning to show this one to Peter. An AI watches videos so you don’t have to. Problem is, AIs are shite at summarizing (imnsho).
I have no clue why I have this installed, because I use and love iStat Menus.
I use this a LOT while writing and programming, and I LIKE IT. Quick and easy text transformations of all types.
I use this when I remember to. Mostly I use it before I’ve had coffee for trying to see what people on the east coast might be doing.
VERY specific text utility for curly quotes, real em and en dashes, etc.
I don’t always search for unicode symbols, but when I do…
Unix timestamps were created by the devil, so I guess this is really just a conduit to hell. But it’s a pretty cool one.
URL encoding and decoding made fun and easy!!!
Who does not need a UUID from time to time? No one, that’s who. If you think you don’t, well now you know why your life is falling apart.
Visual Studio Code - Project Manager
I genuinely have no idea why I have this instead of the general purpose Visual Studio Code extension. Maybe I was drinking beer the night I installed this.
I LOVE WARP!!! I always forget I have this installed though. I know. I’m a loser.
I do webby things a lot. I should probably try to remember I have this installed. “Hey, Scott. You have this installed.”
I used to play this, but then I paid for Lex.games and have never looked back.1
Somewhere in the world, it’s X o’clock!! Find out where!! Also (and even cooler), put in an IP address and find out what time it is for whatever has that stupid IP.
Search YouTube videos and channels like it’s 1999. I don’t know why I said that. I’m not even sure when YouTube was first created.
Speaking of YouTube… download all of YouTube, one video at a time!!!!
Summarium
That’s pretty much it for now. I’m always open to revisiting things and uninstalling some things and installing other things. Most likely in a year from now, not much will have changed though.
Footnotes
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I love Lex.games. Don’t even get me started. ↩
