March 14, 2025 • 45 mins
In this episode, Daniel Miessler explores how to supercharge your macOS workflow with Raycast, transforming everyday tasks into lightning-fast, AI-powered actions.
He talks about:
Raycast as a Universal Launcher:
Daniel explains how Raycast replaces traditional launchers like Spotlight and Alfred, offering an all-in-one shortcut to apps, files, and bookmarks for unparalleled efficiency.
Quick Links and Custom Searches:
He demonstrates how quick links streamline navigation by replacing outdated bookmarks and enabling custom search commands that let you bypass the browser for faster access.
Integrated Utilities and Window Management:
Discover how Raycast consolidates everyday tools—from color pickers and process killers to custom window arrangements—ensuring that all your essential utilities are just a keystroke away.
Advanced AI Integration:
Learn how Raycast’s innovative AI commands integrate with platforms like ChatGPT and Fabric, allowing you to interact with, summarize, and analyze web content directly from your command line.
Custom Commands and Productivity Hacks:
Daniel reveals his secrets for creating personalized hotkeys, snippets, and aliases that reduce friction in your digital workflow, making your daily tasks smoother and more intuitive.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
S1 (00:16):
Hey what's up? So every year towards the end of
the year, I start thinking about how I can optimize
my environment. So basically tools, techniques, processes, notes, whatever. And
this year was no different the end of 2024. And
this time I went crazy, though I went absolutely crazy.
I started optimizing everything. I ended up spending like over 40,
(00:38):
60 hours. I didn't even keep track, but it was
like probably over 60 hours of customizing, like everything. And
ultimately the thing that came back to be the centerpiece
was this tool called raycast. So I'm going to jump
into that. Okay. So here we are over here on
the raycast website. It's raycast comm. And you see that
(00:59):
I'm talking about your shortcut to everything. They actually had
another tagline I think I liked better which was action
at the speed of thought. And this is going to
be a theme that you're going to see throughout this
entire video. And this is the reason that I am
so excited about this. Essentially, if you are on macOS
and you are not using raycast, I'm telling you you
(01:20):
are at a tiny fraction of your possible productivity. It
is that important. If you've been watching any of the
stuff I've been talking about with AI, the whole concept
that I've been harping on and pushing on for all
this time since like whatever the end of 2022 is,
it's not about the tools that you use. It's not
about the technology and how powerful it is. The real
(01:42):
question is, as you go through regular life and you're
trying to actually accomplish things, how quickly can you take
your current problem that just popped into your head and
bring that problem to a particular technology or a particular tool,
and then get the answer back and reincorporate that into
your life in whatever you were doing at that moment.
(02:02):
That is the most important thing for tech integration. We
have an integration problem with tech. We don't have a
capability problem. This is especially true with AI. And AI
is what I'm going to demo Last but what I'm
going to do first is show you a whole series
of a few of the main use cases that I
use raycast for, and why I think it's so powerful.
(02:26):
All right. So the first thing is what are we
talking about here at the very base level like level
zero for this tool is it is a launcher. So
you've used spotlight before. Again we're talking about Mac OS
centric here. You've used spotlight before. A lot of people,
including myself, used Alfred for a very long time. And
this is essentially a successor to Alfred. It's it's just
(02:48):
better in every way. But mad respect to Alfred. It's
still got me through a lot of stuff and it
was very good for the time. So first thing is
just launching, right. So we're going to launch something. You
can launch an app, you could launch notes, you could
launch calendar, you could launch whatever. So that's the same
as with spotlight. That's the same as with Alfred. It's
(03:10):
just a launcher. Now Quick links is the next level.
Next level. And this is my hierarchy here. But I
would say that next level is quick links. And quick
links allows you to do more than just launch. You
can actually launch and configure at the same time. It's
basically like a better launcher. So if I open up
(03:33):
extensions actually, and I go to and I just scroll
down and I'm going to look for a quick links,
we're going to take a look at different things that
I've set up with quick links okay. So here's quick
links here. And here's a good example. So I influence level.
This is a post that people ask about a lot
or I want to just reference and I can't remember it.
(03:55):
Quick links has basically replaced bookmarks for me. I don't
use bookmarks anymore. I actually haven't used them very often
in like the last few years. I just it doesn't
occur to me to go up to manage bookmarks, scroll
over and start looking for something that is not efficient
at all whatsoever. So what I've done is taken anything
that I would have put into bookmarks, and I now
(04:17):
have that inside of individual quick links that I know
that I go to often. So for example this I
influence level post, I influence boom, I didn't even type
all of it. I just typed like a little bit
of it. Right. And this thing pops up so cool. Um,
but what else do we have in there? Uh, extensions.
(04:38):
So I people so this is like I people that
I follow on AP. Yeah. I don't even have to
type all of it. This thing, I'm telling you, it
reads your mind. It reads your mind. If you start
typing a thing once again, go back to the concept
of action at the speed of thought. Just think of
(04:59):
the thing and start typing. And then you're going to
be able to press enter. The more you trust the tool,
the better the tool gets. And we're just going to
go deeper and deeper levels until we get to the
final piece, which is the eye piece, which is absolutely insane.
It's my new eye workflow, but we'll save that to
the end. So here's a bunch of eye people. This
(05:19):
is like an eye list that I put together, so
if I want to look at what I people are
talking about I type this. So I people um, extensions.
All right. Let's say I want to check Amazon orders.
So Amazon orders. Oh look this is like the different
(05:40):
things I've ordered recently. Nothing too embarrassing I think the
editing team checked that out beforehand. All right. I actually
had to rerecord this bit because while I was showing
off a couple of features, I actually clicked on some
crazy drum and bass EDM and it was like super
loud and it went over the whole thing. You might
(06:00):
have saw that version, but basically this is a cleanup
of that. But what I want to talk about now
is extensions. So if I do extensions and I open
this up, this is essentially all the stuff that you
have access to within raycast. And there's a whole store
for this, right? So if you go to the plus
and say install from store, this is where you can
(06:21):
install like all the different things. So this is basically
how you get new functionality into the tool. So essentially
what I did when I did my whole refresh of
my tech stack was I basically figured out all the
different stuff that I was using separate tools for, and
I looked for analogs or like improvements of those inside
of the raycast store. And the vast majority I found
(06:45):
something as good or better, but if we just look
through mine. So Apple notes um bru. So this you basically, um,
clean up search, show anything you have installed with homebrew, calculator, calendar, clipboard, history,
color picker, color picker is kind of cool. Pick color.
And this basically boom. And now that color is, uh,
(07:08):
copied into my clipboard. so now I can just paste
that somewhere else in the hex format. Developer. That's for
like creating extensions. You could control all your Docker images.
Dungeons and Dragons you could do like. Yeah, you could
see everything about your different monsters or whatever. I installed
that because I have a game on Friday which is
actually today. So game night tonight with the friends, uh, GitHub,
(07:31):
Google Workspace home assistant. So you can do all sorts
of stuff with your home menu bar calendar. This is
a thing, um, that I talked about or will talk
about up here in the top right in the menu bar.
Olama I so basically all the different AI stuff that
we're going to talk about, you could also do with
local models with Olama, uh, pick your wallpaper. You can
(07:52):
control wallpaper there. Quick links. We talked about that one. Um,
lots of different raycast things independently. Look at this. This
is all my bookmarks. So I could search my bookmarks.
I can add a bookmark. Again, I'm not using bookmarks
in Arc anymore Uh, because I just I haven't used
browser based bookmarks in so long. Like, I would just
(08:13):
put everything into a queue and I would never go
back to it. Well, what I could do now is
store it in Drop.io, which right now to me is
the best bookmark like manager or database. But the whole
point of bookmarks is you can never find this stuff, right?
So again, this is the interface to that. This is
(08:33):
the way you get into it. Um, wanted to show
just a couple of more things around. Quick links. Real
quick side tangent here. So I have a time server.
All right. So essentially what I'm showing here is this
is my own internal time server. This is a stratum
one time server. Which means I'm not talking to some
(08:54):
other time server that's talking to a time server that
has really good time. I am talking directly to the satellites.
I have a thing in my attic is picking up
really good signal. Look at this 30. Signal to noise ratio. 30dB.
This is really, really high quality signal. And I've seen
(09:16):
27 satellites and I'm currently using 14. And I have
a 3D fix, which means, uh, both, uh, forward sideways
and up and down. Right. So x, y and Z.
Basically it's three dimensions, right. So you need a certain
amount of fix before you can actually get a 3D fix.
(09:37):
And if you look at my, um, well, you can
actually see him because I have him blurred out. But
if you look at my accuracies, it's within like eight
feet for these things. So it's specifically where on the
planet I am sitting in this chair. And the point
is that I set up this DNS inside of my
(09:57):
networking system so I could just instantly go there, right?
But look, I've also got this other one called shake,
and this one is actually my earthquake data. So this
is basically shakes that have happened inside of where I
have this device. So I can go and find earthquakes
when they happen, or if I happen to stomp or
(10:17):
drop weights or something right next to where this thing is.
But just a couple more things that I have, like
inside of quick links. The whole point here is you
don't want to be thinking about what you are doing.
You want to be just executing it. Right? And that
takes us squarely into this next topic, which is quick searches.
So quick searches are a thing that lots of browsers
(10:41):
have had before. And I've done infinite configuration of this
from like probably 8 or 10 different browsers over the years.
So it's basically when you do a command L, you're
able to put like an A in front of something,
and then that A can become like an Amazon and
then you type something and then you're now searching Amazon.
(11:02):
And that was all built inside of the browser. I
don't like that though, because browsers change. I might change
browsers myself and switch to a different one. I would
rather have it be universal. So what I could do
is I could do a space um, time server, and
I now just searched Amazon for time server. If I
(11:24):
do G space time server, I am now doing a
Google search for time server. If I do p time server,
you probably guess what that's going to do. Perplexity. Okay,
so Amazon perplexity Google. And the default is actually this one.
(11:44):
So watch this. This is amazing. And this is going
to tease into the AI part which we're going to
talk about later. But look at this. If I do
time server I didn't type any prefix because the more
important the task is that you are doing, the more
you want to have it involve fewer steps. Okay. You
(12:08):
want to have as few steps as possible. Okay. So
if I type time space server, that's going to look
what it popped up. The default is to search with Google.
So without me typing a G because that's one extra step.
And more importantly, it's one extra friction step inside my
brain of like thinking that I want to search Google.
(12:29):
My default is to search Google. I tried perplexity for
a while. I switched back to Google. Google seems to
be catching up with some of the AI summarization stuff.
I don't know. I'm on the I'm on the fence.
It's like half and half for me. But anyway, the
bottom line is the most important thing that you do.
You want to be more default with fewer steps interrupting you.
(12:52):
So time server press enter with my pinky. And now
I am searching Google. But watch this. Actually I'm not.
I'm not even going to show you. I'm not even
going to show you this part, because that's a teaser
for the AI part, which comes next or comes a
little bit later. All right. So the point of all
of this. Okay, I'm going to keep hitting this because
(13:14):
this is like the most important concept here. We're talking
about friction reduction. We're talking about Neuralink. Okay. When you
first get these tools you have to go to their
independent places. There's no possible way to like invoke them
in a central way. Um, you know, like within a
browser or something. So they're all disparate websites or disparate tools.
(13:36):
You have to go individually, pull them up, then maybe
it gets a little bit easier with something like spotlight,
because you could at least like pull up an invoker
to call the thing, but you can't really access specific
functions of it. The point is, you have a lot
of thinking to do, and that thinking is friction. I
do not want friction. Now, the ultimate version of this,
(13:58):
which is so obvious for everyone, it's not like a secret.
The ultimate version of this is you literally think, and
it literally happens. And that's like what some people are
working on. Ellen's working on with like Neuralink and stuff
like that. So it's literally taking what you're thinking. You're
not moving a muscle and it's going and it's happening. Okay. Well,
(14:20):
we already know that's the ultimate goal and is pretty
far away. So what I like to do just in
life and just in productivity and in programming and in
coding and projects and everything is I think about what
the ultimate is. And then I work backwards to like, okay,
I don't want to be way over here on the
left grasping at like, oh, maybe I could do this,
(14:41):
or maybe I could do that, maybe I could do this.
What I do is I start with the ultimate, and
I work backwards and see how close I can get
to it. Okay, that is why raycast is exciting to
me because it is an early prototype. It is a
closer version to the best thing that we're ever going
to have, which is instant thought and in action, right?
(15:01):
That's why I love the Ray cast motto of action
at the speed of thought. And that's why I think
it's the best motto that they've actually had right action
at the speed of thought. So that's what you do
when you invoke, like this. You're popping this thing up
and you're just typing according to what you're thinking, and
that is pretty damn close. Uh, moving in the direction
(15:25):
of Neuralink. And that's why I'm so excited about it. Okay,
so like we were talking about search snippets, so snip
again watch this ssn e. But what am I typing?
Who even knows? I'm thinking I'm trying to record as well,
but like SS and E look there. SS and ni
are all in search snippets. Once again the thing reads
(15:48):
your mind. It knows what you're thinking of. So search snippets.
This bottom note happens to be one that I made recently.
That's how we did the whole workflow I just did
a second ago. But I could do that with callout
caption Google API key. You got to be careful with these.
You got to watch out. You need to keep in
mind what you're actually storing in here. I don't store
any passwords in here. And actually they have a defense
(16:10):
that kind of makes sure you're not storing things that
are too sensitive. But just keep in mind. But the
point is, all of these different snippets are now available
to me to invoke via raycast, as opposed to using
yet another third party app. So that's really cool. You
can add them very quickly. Um, c n I okay,
(16:35):
c s actually create snippet again, it figures out what
you're trying to do. So if I want to just
press enter I can make a new snippet okay. So
that's that's how snippets work. Next thing I want to
talk about is actually screenshots. Okay. Screenshots. Super super cool.
This is like one of the most powerful things you
(16:57):
could do with raycast and people who love screenshots are
going to love this like you cannot believe. All right,
so watch this. I'm going to take a screenshot with
boom boom boom. I think it's shift command four if
I'm not mistaken. So I'm going to take this screenshot
pops down here. And then I'm going to go watch this.
(17:17):
See I could have typed SC either way. And by
the way I didn't even set up an alias. This
is just figuring it out by itself. Search screenshots I'm
going to press enter. Watch this. Whoa. It just pulled
it up. Text. Whoa I just typed text. Guess what?
Guess what? Watch. This raycast is doing OCR on the content.
(17:41):
It knows if there's text in the screenshot. Okay, I
actually have something else that's like crazy cool, which is
a whole separate talk show. But look what I got
set up. I've got a thing that actually identifies what's
in the screenshot and it renames the screenshot. And I
(18:03):
actually talk about this in the in the full video.
I talked about it earlier, but anyway this is not required.
It's unrelated to what raycast is doing, but I just
thought I would mention that because it's kind of cool.
So again see search screenshots. This one is actually recent.
So um, let me just type construction. Look at that construction.
(18:24):
It finds the construction. This is actually a picture of
my house being built a long time ago, 2021. But, um,
it figures out construction. I wonder if it would find would. Look.
That's ridiculous. How many screenshots do you take? All the
time and you can't find them? This is integrated right in.
This is not a third party tool. This is built
right in. I'm telling you, if you get your utilities
(18:47):
into this system for 2025, you're going to be flying
around your operating system. That's what I'm doing now. I'm
just like thinking stuff happens and I haven't even told
you the coolest one yet, which is the I one.
All right, for the next one, I want to actually
talk about my menu bar and I'm using a utility.
I can't remember if this is fully integrated with raycast,
(19:10):
or if it's just like a third party utility that
somebody was talking about. Um, it was one of the
interviews from the raycast show. In fact, let me just
go over there to uh, raycast, which I should make
a quick link for that. But anyway, um, let's see
if they have like a link to their YouTube. All right.
(19:31):
Another piece of functionality I want to show you is
actually searching videos. So something just made me think of
the main guy doing all the videos for raycast. His
name is Pedro and this is actually his website. He's
like super cool. I love all the videos. I love
the way he presents all the information and I feel
like they made a good choice because he actually gets
(19:51):
why raycast is so important, which would make sense. Why
he's in charge of running the YouTube channel. I'm not
sure what he officially does, but he's the the face
that I see the most from the videos over there.
But anyway, here's his website. And by the way, the
website is like completely sick and behind this blurred out
text is actually him doing the videos like that is cool.
(20:14):
And it's not even hitting my GPU or CPU that much,
which is kind of interesting. But anyway, I want to
show you just real quick one more extension for actually
searching videos. So if I do SV search video, look,
I'm actually searching YouTube for videos. So if I do
like quick links and raycast, I'm actually searching YouTube videos
(20:39):
for raycast content about quick links. Okay, so I. And
there he is right there. That's Pedro. He's the one
doing all these videos. And here he is talking about
mastering quick links. And you can listen to him here.
S2 (20:53):
And today I want to show you how to master them.
S1 (20:55):
So that is essentially how to search for videos very quickly.
Again you could do this for anything. Um, so SRV again,
search videos. Uh mizler fabric and it should pull up
fabric videos. Yeah. It's got network chuck there. So this
is a basically a way to find any of your
own videos. You could find channels. This way you could
(21:17):
find videos this way you could do like whatever you
want to do. So again, another interface for searching not
just web but also videos. Okay. So the next piece
of functionality I want to talk about is actually my
menu bar. So my menu bar, it's actually got a
bunch of functionality in it. So I've got all these
tools that are up there that are up there. Normally
you might have to zoom in for this one because
(21:38):
the menu bar is just kind of small and I
can't really easily zoom. But I've got this tool called
Hidden Bar, and this came from one of like the
100 videos that I watched about raycast. Some of these
tools are separate, and they just kind of integrate with
raycast and go into the menu bar, and other times
they're just kind of like unrelated. But anyway, hidden bar
(21:58):
or hidden menu. I'm not sure exactly what it's called.
It basically hides and cleans up your menu bar, but
I'm going to go through step by step. This is
actually because I'm recording right now. But look at this.
This is a tool called stats. Stats is kind of
like a free replacement for stat menus. And it basically
works the same. It kind of looks the same. It's very,
(22:19):
very cool. I got you here. One little tidbit for you.
If you go to Raycast Comm and you look at
this little background thing, look at this, look at the
GPU going wild right now. Okay. Yeah. So stepping through
these different things in the top here I've got CPU,
I've got GPU, I've got memory, I've got my disk
(22:43):
and I've got network. And look at this right here.
This is really cool. So right here it tells me
what my next meeting is and it tells me how
long before that happens. And right here it shows me
what I have as well. But it also gives me
a calendar view. So this is like mini calendar. This
is my schedule which is built into raycast. And they're
(23:06):
all putting those there appropriately. And I basically took a
bunch of stuff out of the menu that I didn't
want there and put them there. And this one is
really cool. This came from a video that Pedro had
somebody on and they had this. This is the number
of people that are actively browsing my website like this
exact second. And I could open that up in fathom,
which is the Fathom Analytics platform that allows this to happen.
(23:29):
Then I've got the weather, I've got my notes. This
is my current focus state, and that's pretty much it.
So this is like a collapsed version, which is way
cleaner than that nightmare right there. So menu bar integration
I'm most excited about this one, which shows me my
calendar and my schedule for exactly what I have to
(23:51):
do today, and it's available in one click. And even
better than a click, it's available as a view. So
I could look up and see in an hour and
11 minutes I'm going to talk to Edward. Okay. So
that was the menu bar. All right. Now I want
to show you the thing I actually have been wanting
to show you the whole time, which is the thing
that has most changed my workflow from all the different changes,
(24:14):
like hundreds of different changes that I made with my
toolset and my workflows and my processes, and most importantly,
raycast of all the different ones. I save the best
for last and that is AI integration. So I've done
tons of AI. You've probably seen a bunch of the videos.
If you haven't, please go check them out. But my
core concept with AI, as I talked about before, is
(24:37):
we don't have an AI technology problem. There are a
million different AI websites. There are a million different AI tools,
there's a million different AI utilities. And like, what are
you supposed to do when you have a given problem.
Which tool are you supposed to use? Which utility? Which website?
That's the hardest part. Right. You have anthropic. You have OpenAI,
(24:58):
you have all these different things. And like I said before,
we don't have a capability problem. We have an integration problem.
And with AI it's the absolute worst. Integrating the problems
that you have with the AI that you have is
the hardest thing. And so my first thing that I
was thinking of when I started looking at raycast is like,
(25:19):
how can I get a bunch of my AI stuff
into there? So real quick, I want to pull up
this platform that I built called fabric. So if we
just go to fabric we go to the GitHub. This
is the repo and this is the project and it's
pretty cool. I recommend you check it out on its own. Um,
(25:39):
basically it is a whole bunch of crowdsourced prompts that
do a whole bunch of stuff, uh, solving particular use cases.
There's like cybersecurity use cases. There's like life, uh, use cases.
There's just a million different things that you could do
inside of fabric. And the center of it is these patterns. Okay.
(26:00):
These patterns allow you to do like a million different things.
All right. So let me just go up to the
patterns here. And if I click on patterns and look
at this analyze answers, analyze candidates. Analyze paper analyze spiritual text.
Create better frame like there's a bunch of videos from
other people. Right. So I would say go check these out.
(26:22):
These are integrations. These are problems and solutions to specific
problems that we have in our life. But here's the problem.
You have this problem. Extract recipe, extract questions, extract video ID.
You have this thing that you want to do, but
you're inside of some application. How do you get that
thing from here to there? Right. So what I like
(26:45):
to do is I go and I open up fabric
on the command line because I'm a command line person,
I like that, but that's not for enough people, right?
Not enough people use the command line. A very small
percentage of people are command line first, like I am, right?
And I understand that. So I'm looking for other ways
to integrate. And we've done a couple of different things.
But raycast is the absolute best one. So I'm going
(27:08):
to show you a couple of ways to integrate these
patterns inside of raycast. But first we're actually going to
build up from there. So we're actually going to go
in order. All right let's just skip all that I'm
actually just going to do the fabric one separately afterwards.
Like I said I'm most excited about talking about this
(27:29):
AI stuff. And here's the actual flow for doing this
in a smarter way like I was talking about. So
normally what you do is you do something like, okay,
you launch clod. Okay, so here's a clod application. You
can type into clod. You can get your results back. Cool.
Or you can come over here and you could go
(27:50):
to cloud Sky and you can get your answers from there. Um.
That's Claude. I personally prefer, uh, OpenAI, so that would
be like ChatGPT, but I never go to the website anymore.
I'm not even logged in. I don't go to the
website anymore because of raycast, so check this out. I
(28:13):
told you before in quick searches that I could do
p space something right and search for it. That's cool.
And I also told you you could do g space
and you could search for something on Google. And I
also told you that if you do just whatever search term,
you can actually just do it right from the command line.
And you don't have to do the G, because that
(28:35):
is your default one that you set to the top.
So I just did a search on Google by invoking raycast,
typing the search term and pressing enter so you get
back whatever. Right. So that is really powerful. All right.
So I talked about how you could do that quick
search with Google. Right. So you can just type whatever
(28:57):
here and it's going to go and search that in Google.
But what if I could type like I fabric mizler here.
And instead of pressing enter we know what that would do.
It would be a Google search. Instead I switch over
to the option key and I press enter. Guess what
I just did? I just skipped all those steps of
(29:20):
going to an AI application, calling up like an actual
thick client on the computer, or going to a website
like OpenAI or Claude or Anthropic or whatever, and typing
into a website, right? So rather than clicking or even
using raycast to open the website, I'm bypassing that completely
(29:42):
and just typing it into raycast and instead of pressing
regular enter, I press. And this is configurable option enter
and it brings this up. Okay so let me search.
So let me show you this. Okay. This is insane.
Look it didn't just give me the LM response. And
by the way I'm using Claude three five sonnet for this.
(30:03):
You can configure this to any model that you want
to use. Sonnet I'm using it seems pretty fast. I
like it a lot. So it gives me not only
an LM answer, but look what it did. It gave
me the GitHub for fabric. It gave me my website
to talk more about the introduction to fabric and why
I created it. This is custom raycast built functionality wrapped
(30:26):
around the AI. Okay, so I could click on these
links and guess what? It's going to pull up fabric
the actual um project. It's going to pull up the
actual project because of those links. So again I fabric Mizler. Alt. Enter.
It's going to search it up again. It's probably going
to find similar things or say similar things and find
(30:49):
the same links. Plus eight. Look at this. It found
all these links as well. So I've got all these references.
That is not the crazy part. You want to see
the crazy part. Watch this. Do you see this right here?
I got to actually move my mouse command J. Watch this.
Command J. I just launched into a dedicated AI conversation location. Okay,
(31:13):
so now I can say I don't get it. What
does fabric do? Let me search for a clear explanation
of what fabric does. It's going to go and consume
this whole web page. Think about it. A collection of
pre-made AI prompts called patterns that help users get better
(31:34):
results from AI systems. So again, more links to GitHub
plus all these different links. And now I can just
have a dynamic conversation with my AI about the web
page that I'm on. Okay, so I'm going to go
back to threshold, which is a different app that I built. Um,
what is this, uh, incredible conundrum of life's origin? Okay,
(31:56):
let's go and click on that. Well, that's got a login,
so let's not click on that one. Okay. This guy
is really cool. I follow this guy. Well this is
actually Daring Fireball talking about Simon Willison. But Simon Willison
is a cool AI guy you should check out. He's
basically a developer who talks a lot about AI, but
this is the website. So what is he talking about here? Right?
(32:19):
What is he actually talking about? Here? Watch this. This
is absolutely insane. This is the fastest thing you can
think of some. Oh, I typed three letters, some summarise page.
This is a custom thing that I wrote, which actually
brings it down to one sentence. And I'm going to
show you how to write these in a second. Bring
(32:42):
it down to one sentence. Models got faster, cheaper with
better vision. Audio features while running locally became possible. That's
the one sentence summary. Watch this. This one is actually
built in to raycast. I summarize web page again. It's
pulling from the live web page that I'm on and
it does a full breakdown of the stuff. Okay, I'm
(33:03):
going to go back to my site because I know
the content better. This one's called fast versus slow. I
again I'm on the thing. I'm like, oh, this is
too long. I don't want to read this. This is lame.
I got to go to a meeting in 30s sum
summarize page. What did I actually say here? Fast AI
helps find content, but slow human processing remains vital for
(33:26):
meaningful learning and growth. I actually used a fabric pattern
to make this. Okay, um, I've got another one called
Extract Wisdom e w extract wisdom. This will extract wisdom
using a fabric pattern, which is a prompt which will
pull a summary. The summary is going to be better,
(33:48):
even maybe than the summarize page one that I wrote. Look,
pull all the ideas out of it and it just
keeps going, right? But I could summarize all the different ideas.
I could get quotes out of it. I could do whatever.
If there's something that actually talks about predictions, let's go
to like what's going to have a cool bleeping bleeping
(34:08):
computer bad signature Subaru Starlink flaw. Okay, here we go.
Subaru Starlink flaw lets hackers hijacked cars in US and
Canada extract primary problem. This one is a another fabric
thing that I wrote, which kind of summarizes what this
(34:28):
piece of content thinks is the biggest problem. And it's
a good way of summarizing. In my opinion, connected vehicles
create dangerous security vulnerabilities that expose private data and physical safety. Cool.
Makes sense. And you probably could have got that from
the summary as well. Summarize page. This is probably going
to talk more about the vulnerability security flaw and Subaru.
(34:49):
Starlink allowed company vehicle control through license plates affecting US,
Canada and Japan. Bottom line is I could use any
of my fabric patterns. So watch this. I go back fabric,
go to the GitHub project that we created. Go to
the patterns. I could turn any of these workflows. This
(35:11):
is like hundreds from hundreds of contributors. All these I
could turn into instant things that I could do on
any website, on any block of text. It's just absolutely insane.
So so this workflow is just unbelievable. I no longer
have to go to a web page to start doing
(35:33):
AI stuff. Okay, this is basically my cloud and my I?
OpenAI all built in, but it's inside of raycast. It's.
And I don't use those standalone apps anymore. Um, unless
I'm doing some very specified stuff, like in the playground
for the different platforms when I'm building my own AI workflows.
(35:53):
But in terms of like day to day use, day
to day workflows, I am not using anything except for raycast.
That is how good they have made this right. So again,
the number one workflow is I'm searching the web so
I fabric Meisler enter Google option, enter a search command
(36:18):
J have a conversation about it. Or let's say we're
on another cool website. This is Pedro's website, which by
the way, like I said before is very, very cool.
So I click on writing a website refresh 2023 things
I use. Okay, this is the different stuff that he uses.
I wonder if this is probably the background for the
raycast videos. That background right there? Pretty sure it is,
(36:41):
but he's got all his different stuff here. So this
is a great example. I'm going to show you a
great example of this. He's got this thing. He's got
all these pictures. He's got all the stuff. And it's like, okay, cool.
I just want to know a very specific thing. Okay.
So I'm going to do a some summarize page and
just get a summary. That's probably where I start. And
(37:03):
then if I do command J, I can say what
kind of desk is he using. And of course, yeah,
I could just go over here and read and look
for the desk. So he says fully Jarvis, stand up
desk again. I could just ask the AI and it
could look, this page could have been 200 pages long, right?
And I don't have the time to look for it,
(37:23):
or I don't want to do a command F and
find it. Whatever. Um, again, I can go into more detail.
What kind of cameras does he shoot on? Look at that. Zv-e10.
I haven't even heard of that one. Photography. Yeah. iPhone
15 Pro. Just. You could just dive into content in
(37:45):
and out of content however you want and then watch this.
This is this is insane. So if you go to, uh,
first of all, command comma opens the configuration for any app.
That's just a macOS thing. But look, if you go
to I. So a custom global hotkey I have it
(38:06):
set to option enter. Okay, here's the other main use
case for I not being actually on a website or
copying text, or you're on a current browser tab or something,
but instead you just want to ask AI a question.
I have a custom hotkey set for that. It's the
same command. See it's option option down here, but it's
(38:28):
option A, and again I have that shortcut set up
inside of raycast. So watch this Option A it pops
up my thing. So I do a command n I'm
in a new I session. This is exactly the same
as going to like ChatGPT and starting a new session.
Except for again, you're doing it from raycast instead and
I didn't type raycast and then type something in and
(38:52):
press command or and then pressed option enter. In fact
I just did option A, because option A is the
universal hotkey for opening my AI conversations. Okay, so from
here I could just do any regular AI search that
I'm in an AI conversation. Okay, next thing I want
to talk about I'm going to close that out is
(39:13):
I want to talk about the options. So when you
open raycast. So I'm just going to open raycast. And
if you do command comma this is a universal way
to get to settings in Mac OS. So if I
go to the settings and I go to AI, I
can see that I can edit my universal hotkey for
pulling up AI, which is like I said, option enter.
You could change your model here and it could use
(39:35):
whatever model you want. And again I chat right there
is option A and send message is returned. You can
configure all this. But then if I go to configure
I commands look at all the different commands that I
could use. Search AI commands send screen to I chat.
You can send your current screen to AI and it'll
(39:57):
tell you what's on the screen. Change the tone to casual.
Explain the story explanation. Okay. This is this is a
really cool one. Um, so I'm on this tab story explanation.
This will create a story explanation of the web page
that I'm on. And I wrote this one. This is
actually a fabric integrated one. And it explains it in
(40:19):
a way like you could explain to your grandmother or
whatever and basically have it be a narrative to simplify
whatever it is that you're working on. Um, but that's
just one that I created. So create tone to friendly.
Most of these are actually just already built in. This
one was a fabric one that I added myself. Extract predictions,
(40:41):
extract the primary problem, extract wisdom, find bugs in code,
fix the spelling and grammar. This is all just naturally
built in. And most importantly, create an AI command. Okay,
if I do see a I create AI command. So
now we have a command name. We have a prompt,
(41:03):
we have the model we want to use, and we
can go and save that thing. It's insane. So you
can just keep adding to this list that you see here.
And look at this. If you're worried about sending this
off to a third party, look at this. You could
run it with Obama. If you have Obama running, which
I tend to have a llama running. I don't know
(41:24):
if I have it yet, but I just restarted Obama now,
I could use any of these same things that you're doing.
Improve the writing. Make it longer, make it shorter, whatever
you could call olama with local models and not send
it off anywhere to do that same stuff. So it's
whatever integration you want to use. But long story short,
(41:46):
all of this comes down to raycast being a universal
launcher that allows you to do all this different stuff
we've talked about. All right, so that was just a
few of the main ones that I wanted to talk
about and share with you. Like I said, you can
deep dive in rabbit Hole on this and you will
(42:06):
come back many, many hours later or days later like
I did. And I haven't even started fully configuring all
my AI stuff. I'm actually building a full extension for
fabric to just have the commands for all the patterns
right there. So it's like fuzzy finding. As I'm typing.
I could type in the pattern name and it will
(42:27):
autocomplete for me, and it will run that against the
web page or against the clipboard text or whatever. So
I haven't even started messing with this thing fully, and
I'm already like a hundred times more useful than I
was at the end of 24 before I started this process.
So again, invoke think action happens. And most importantly of
(42:50):
all the extensions, the AI integration have AI right here
available here type type type type option enter and you
are inside of AI. You do command J to continue
the conversation or if you want to start from scratch,
you just do command a. If you set that up
as your alias for AI. And I want to show
(43:10):
you that real quick. So showing you real quick how
to set these up. So basically those are hotkeys. Alias
means you're already inside of raycast. Hotkey means you're invoking
it straight from the operating system. So you're just at
the keyboard, you're invoking it. So if I scroll down
here you're going to see a bunch of these. Option
A is for I chat. So that's like look, so
(43:31):
I'm out here, I'm not doing anything and I do
option A and I'm inside of I with a regular chat.
So that's option A. But I have this for C
which is cursor, I have it for B which is browser,
I have it for lots of different things. So I
have hotkeys configured for lots of different stuff. Again you
(43:52):
can go and set this up to your heart's content. Right.
And and if you are a massive customizer like me,
you're going to want to do a ton of these.
So I've got a ton of these for aliases. I've
got a ton of these for hotkeys. So T.W. this
is thinkers work. Oh yeah. This one's crazy. So look
at this t w tab. This is a fabric one
(44:14):
for thinkers work. This is kind of a diversion. But
whatever I could do this video for like five hours.
So thinkers work. So if I put in Bertrand Russell
in here, it's going to give me a one line
encapsulation of what Bertrand Russell is about. It's going to
give you his most important ideas, the most important works,
to go look at the most important quotes and advice.
(44:37):
So that's a fabric pattern integrated in. And the reason
I'm showing it to you now is because T.W. is
how I get there. So basically I don't have to
type thinkers work or even start typing it. I could
just do T.W. so basically I don't have to type
thinkers work or even start typing it. I could just
(44:57):
do T.W. tab and it automatically knows that. In fact,
I think I could go T.W. space as well. So T.W.
space or T.W. Tab also gets you there. And you
could just put anybody in here and it will summarize
their work and give you back that synopsis. All right.
So that's what I wanted to share with you basically
(45:19):
my new religion of raycast and specifically how to use
AI within raycast. And we'll see you in the next one.
Take care.
Hey what's up? So every year towards the end of
the year, I start thinking about how I can optimize
my environment. So basically tools, techniques, processes, notes, whatever. And
this year was no different the end of 2024. And
this time I went crazy, though I went absolutely crazy.
I started optimizing everything. I ended up spending like over 40,
(00:38):
60 hours. I didn't even keep track, but it was
like probably over 60 hours of customizing, like everything. And
ultimately the thing that came back to be the centerpiece
was this tool called raycast. So I'm going to jump
into that. Okay. So here we are over here on
the raycast website. It's raycast comm. And you see that
(00:59):
I'm talking about your shortcut to everything. They actually had
another tagline I think I liked better which was action
at the speed of thought. And this is going to
be a theme that you're going to see throughout this
entire video. And this is the reason that I am
so excited about this. Essentially, if you are on macOS
and you are not using raycast, I'm telling you you
(01:20):
are at a tiny fraction of your possible productivity. It
is that important. If you've been watching any of the
stuff I've been talking about with AI, the whole concept
that I've been harping on and pushing on for all
this time since like whatever the end of 2022 is,
it's not about the tools that you use. It's not
about the technology and how powerful it is. The real
(01:42):
question is, as you go through regular life and you're
trying to actually accomplish things, how quickly can you take
your current problem that just popped into your head and
bring that problem to a particular technology or a particular tool,
and then get the answer back and reincorporate that into
your life in whatever you were doing at that moment.
(02:02):
That is the most important thing for tech integration. We
have an integration problem with tech. We don't have a
capability problem. This is especially true with AI. And AI
is what I'm going to demo Last but what I'm
going to do first is show you a whole series
of a few of the main use cases that I
use raycast for, and why I think it's so powerful.
(02:26):
All right. So the first thing is what are we
talking about here at the very base level like level
zero for this tool is it is a launcher. So
you've used spotlight before. Again we're talking about Mac OS
centric here. You've used spotlight before. A lot of people,
including myself, used Alfred for a very long time. And
this is essentially a successor to Alfred. It's it's just
(02:48):
better in every way. But mad respect to Alfred. It's
still got me through a lot of stuff and it
was very good for the time. So first thing is
just launching, right. So we're going to launch something. You
can launch an app, you could launch notes, you could
launch calendar, you could launch whatever. So that's the same
as with spotlight. That's the same as with Alfred. It's
(03:10):
just a launcher. Now Quick links is the next level.
Next level. And this is my hierarchy here. But I
would say that next level is quick links. And quick
links allows you to do more than just launch. You
can actually launch and configure at the same time. It's
basically like a better launcher. So if I open up
(03:33):
extensions actually, and I go to and I just scroll
down and I'm going to look for a quick links,
we're going to take a look at different things that
I've set up with quick links okay. So here's quick
links here. And here's a good example. So I influence level.
This is a post that people ask about a lot
or I want to just reference and I can't remember it.
(03:55):
Quick links has basically replaced bookmarks for me. I don't
use bookmarks anymore. I actually haven't used them very often
in like the last few years. I just it doesn't
occur to me to go up to manage bookmarks, scroll
over and start looking for something that is not efficient
at all whatsoever. So what I've done is taken anything
that I would have put into bookmarks, and I now
(04:17):
have that inside of individual quick links that I know
that I go to often. So for example this I
influence level post, I influence boom, I didn't even type
all of it. I just typed like a little bit
of it. Right. And this thing pops up so cool. Um,
but what else do we have in there? Uh, extensions.
(04:38):
So I people so this is like I people that
I follow on AP. Yeah. I don't even have to
type all of it. This thing, I'm telling you, it
reads your mind. It reads your mind. If you start
typing a thing once again, go back to the concept
of action at the speed of thought. Just think of
(04:59):
the thing and start typing. And then you're going to
be able to press enter. The more you trust the tool,
the better the tool gets. And we're just going to
go deeper and deeper levels until we get to the
final piece, which is the eye piece, which is absolutely insane.
It's my new eye workflow, but we'll save that to
the end. So here's a bunch of eye people. This
(05:19):
is like an eye list that I put together, so
if I want to look at what I people are
talking about I type this. So I people um, extensions.
All right. Let's say I want to check Amazon orders.
So Amazon orders. Oh look this is like the different
(05:40):
things I've ordered recently. Nothing too embarrassing I think the
editing team checked that out beforehand. All right. I actually
had to rerecord this bit because while I was showing
off a couple of features, I actually clicked on some
crazy drum and bass EDM and it was like super
loud and it went over the whole thing. You might
(06:00):
have saw that version, but basically this is a cleanup
of that. But what I want to talk about now
is extensions. So if I do extensions and I open
this up, this is essentially all the stuff that you
have access to within raycast. And there's a whole store
for this, right? So if you go to the plus
and say install from store, this is where you can
(06:21):
install like all the different things. So this is basically
how you get new functionality into the tool. So essentially
what I did when I did my whole refresh of
my tech stack was I basically figured out all the
different stuff that I was using separate tools for, and
I looked for analogs or like improvements of those inside
of the raycast store. And the vast majority I found
(06:45):
something as good or better, but if we just look
through mine. So Apple notes um bru. So this you basically, um,
clean up search, show anything you have installed with homebrew, calculator, calendar, clipboard, history,
color picker, color picker is kind of cool. Pick color.
And this basically boom. And now that color is, uh,
(07:08):
copied into my clipboard. so now I can just paste
that somewhere else in the hex format. Developer. That's for
like creating extensions. You could control all your Docker images.
Dungeons and Dragons you could do like. Yeah, you could
see everything about your different monsters or whatever. I installed
that because I have a game on Friday which is
actually today. So game night tonight with the friends, uh, GitHub,
(07:31):
Google Workspace home assistant. So you can do all sorts
of stuff with your home menu bar calendar. This is
a thing, um, that I talked about or will talk
about up here in the top right in the menu bar.
Olama I so basically all the different AI stuff that
we're going to talk about, you could also do with
local models with Olama, uh, pick your wallpaper. You can
(07:52):
control wallpaper there. Quick links. We talked about that one. Um,
lots of different raycast things independently. Look at this. This
is all my bookmarks. So I could search my bookmarks.
I can add a bookmark. Again, I'm not using bookmarks
in Arc anymore Uh, because I just I haven't used
browser based bookmarks in so long. Like, I would just
(08:13):
put everything into a queue and I would never go
back to it. Well, what I could do now is
store it in Drop.io, which right now to me is
the best bookmark like manager or database. But the whole
point of bookmarks is you can never find this stuff, right?
So again, this is the interface to that. This is
(08:33):
the way you get into it. Um, wanted to show
just a couple of more things around. Quick links. Real
quick side tangent here. So I have a time server.
All right. So essentially what I'm showing here is this
is my own internal time server. This is a stratum
one time server. Which means I'm not talking to some
(08:54):
other time server that's talking to a time server that
has really good time. I am talking directly to the satellites.
I have a thing in my attic is picking up
really good signal. Look at this 30. Signal to noise ratio. 30dB.
This is really, really high quality signal. And I've seen
(09:16):
27 satellites and I'm currently using 14. And I have
a 3D fix, which means, uh, both, uh, forward sideways
and up and down. Right. So x, y and Z.
Basically it's three dimensions, right. So you need a certain
amount of fix before you can actually get a 3D fix.
(09:37):
And if you look at my, um, well, you can
actually see him because I have him blurred out. But
if you look at my accuracies, it's within like eight
feet for these things. So it's specifically where on the
planet I am sitting in this chair. And the point
is that I set up this DNS inside of my
(09:57):
networking system so I could just instantly go there, right?
But look, I've also got this other one called shake,
and this one is actually my earthquake data. So this
is basically shakes that have happened inside of where I
have this device. So I can go and find earthquakes
when they happen, or if I happen to stomp or
(10:17):
drop weights or something right next to where this thing is.
But just a couple more things that I have, like
inside of quick links. The whole point here is you
don't want to be thinking about what you are doing.
You want to be just executing it. Right? And that
takes us squarely into this next topic, which is quick searches.
So quick searches are a thing that lots of browsers
(10:41):
have had before. And I've done infinite configuration of this
from like probably 8 or 10 different browsers over the years.
So it's basically when you do a command L, you're
able to put like an A in front of something,
and then that A can become like an Amazon and
then you type something and then you're now searching Amazon.
(11:02):
And that was all built inside of the browser. I
don't like that though, because browsers change. I might change
browsers myself and switch to a different one. I would
rather have it be universal. So what I could do
is I could do a space um, time server, and
I now just searched Amazon for time server. If I
(11:24):
do G space time server, I am now doing a
Google search for time server. If I do p time server,
you probably guess what that's going to do. Perplexity. Okay,
so Amazon perplexity Google. And the default is actually this one.
(11:44):
So watch this. This is amazing. And this is going
to tease into the AI part which we're going to
talk about later. But look at this. If I do
time server I didn't type any prefix because the more
important the task is that you are doing, the more
you want to have it involve fewer steps. Okay. You
(12:08):
want to have as few steps as possible. Okay. So
if I type time space server, that's going to look
what it popped up. The default is to search with Google.
So without me typing a G because that's one extra step.
And more importantly, it's one extra friction step inside my
brain of like thinking that I want to search Google.
(12:29):
My default is to search Google. I tried perplexity for
a while. I switched back to Google. Google seems to
be catching up with some of the AI summarization stuff.
I don't know. I'm on the I'm on the fence.
It's like half and half for me. But anyway, the
bottom line is the most important thing that you do.
You want to be more default with fewer steps interrupting you.
(12:52):
So time server press enter with my pinky. And now
I am searching Google. But watch this. Actually I'm not.
I'm not even going to show you. I'm not even
going to show you this part, because that's a teaser
for the AI part, which comes next or comes a
little bit later. All right. So the point of all
of this. Okay, I'm going to keep hitting this because
(13:14):
this is like the most important concept here. We're talking
about friction reduction. We're talking about Neuralink. Okay. When you
first get these tools you have to go to their
independent places. There's no possible way to like invoke them
in a central way. Um, you know, like within a
browser or something. So they're all disparate websites or disparate tools.
(13:36):
You have to go individually, pull them up, then maybe
it gets a little bit easier with something like spotlight,
because you could at least like pull up an invoker
to call the thing, but you can't really access specific
functions of it. The point is, you have a lot
of thinking to do, and that thinking is friction. I
do not want friction. Now, the ultimate version of this,
(13:58):
which is so obvious for everyone, it's not like a secret.
The ultimate version of this is you literally think, and
it literally happens. And that's like what some people are
working on. Ellen's working on with like Neuralink and stuff
like that. So it's literally taking what you're thinking. You're
not moving a muscle and it's going and it's happening. Okay. Well,
(14:20):
we already know that's the ultimate goal and is pretty
far away. So what I like to do just in
life and just in productivity and in programming and in
coding and projects and everything is I think about what
the ultimate is. And then I work backwards to like, okay,
I don't want to be way over here on the
left grasping at like, oh, maybe I could do this,
(14:41):
or maybe I could do that, maybe I could do this.
What I do is I start with the ultimate, and
I work backwards and see how close I can get
to it. Okay, that is why raycast is exciting to
me because it is an early prototype. It is a
closer version to the best thing that we're ever going
to have, which is instant thought and in action, right?
(15:01):
That's why I love the Ray cast motto of action
at the speed of thought. And that's why I think
it's the best motto that they've actually had right action
at the speed of thought. So that's what you do
when you invoke, like this. You're popping this thing up
and you're just typing according to what you're thinking, and
that is pretty damn close. Uh, moving in the direction
(15:25):
of Neuralink. And that's why I'm so excited about it. Okay,
so like we were talking about search snippets, so snip
again watch this ssn e. But what am I typing?
Who even knows? I'm thinking I'm trying to record as well,
but like SS and E look there. SS and ni
are all in search snippets. Once again the thing reads
(15:48):
your mind. It knows what you're thinking of. So search snippets.
This bottom note happens to be one that I made recently.
That's how we did the whole workflow I just did
a second ago. But I could do that with callout
caption Google API key. You got to be careful with these.
You got to watch out. You need to keep in
mind what you're actually storing in here. I don't store
any passwords in here. And actually they have a defense
(16:10):
that kind of makes sure you're not storing things that
are too sensitive. But just keep in mind. But the
point is, all of these different snippets are now available
to me to invoke via raycast, as opposed to using
yet another third party app. So that's really cool. You
can add them very quickly. Um, c n I okay,
(16:35):
c s actually create snippet again, it figures out what
you're trying to do. So if I want to just
press enter I can make a new snippet okay. So
that's that's how snippets work. Next thing I want to
talk about is actually screenshots. Okay. Screenshots. Super super cool.
This is like one of the most powerful things you
(16:57):
could do with raycast and people who love screenshots are
going to love this like you cannot believe. All right,
so watch this. I'm going to take a screenshot with
boom boom boom. I think it's shift command four if
I'm not mistaken. So I'm going to take this screenshot
pops down here. And then I'm going to go watch this.
(17:17):
See I could have typed SC either way. And by
the way I didn't even set up an alias. This
is just figuring it out by itself. Search screenshots I'm
going to press enter. Watch this. Whoa. It just pulled
it up. Text. Whoa I just typed text. Guess what?
Guess what? Watch. This raycast is doing OCR on the content.
(17:41):
It knows if there's text in the screenshot. Okay, I
actually have something else that's like crazy cool, which is
a whole separate talk show. But look what I got
set up. I've got a thing that actually identifies what's
in the screenshot and it renames the screenshot. And I
(18:03):
actually talk about this in the in the full video.
I talked about it earlier, but anyway this is not required.
It's unrelated to what raycast is doing, but I just
thought I would mention that because it's kind of cool.
So again see search screenshots. This one is actually recent.
So um, let me just type construction. Look at that construction.
(18:24):
It finds the construction. This is actually a picture of
my house being built a long time ago, 2021. But, um,
it figures out construction. I wonder if it would find would. Look.
That's ridiculous. How many screenshots do you take? All the
time and you can't find them? This is integrated right in.
This is not a third party tool. This is built
right in. I'm telling you, if you get your utilities
(18:47):
into this system for 2025, you're going to be flying
around your operating system. That's what I'm doing now. I'm
just like thinking stuff happens and I haven't even told
you the coolest one yet, which is the I one.
All right, for the next one, I want to actually
talk about my menu bar and I'm using a utility.
I can't remember if this is fully integrated with raycast,
(19:10):
or if it's just like a third party utility that
somebody was talking about. Um, it was one of the
interviews from the raycast show. In fact, let me just
go over there to uh, raycast, which I should make
a quick link for that. But anyway, um, let's see
if they have like a link to their YouTube. All right.
(19:31):
Another piece of functionality I want to show you is
actually searching videos. So something just made me think of
the main guy doing all the videos for raycast. His
name is Pedro and this is actually his website. He's
like super cool. I love all the videos. I love
the way he presents all the information and I feel
like they made a good choice because he actually gets
(19:51):
why raycast is so important, which would make sense. Why
he's in charge of running the YouTube channel. I'm not
sure what he officially does, but he's the the face
that I see the most from the videos over there.
But anyway, here's his website. And by the way, the
website is like completely sick and behind this blurred out
text is actually him doing the videos like that is cool.
(20:14):
And it's not even hitting my GPU or CPU that much,
which is kind of interesting. But anyway, I want to
show you just real quick one more extension for actually
searching videos. So if I do SV search video, look,
I'm actually searching YouTube for videos. So if I do
like quick links and raycast, I'm actually searching YouTube videos
(20:39):
for raycast content about quick links. Okay, so I. And
there he is right there. That's Pedro. He's the one
doing all these videos. And here he is talking about
mastering quick links. And you can listen to him here.
S2 (20:53):
And today I want to show you how to master them.
S1 (20:55):
So that is essentially how to search for videos very quickly.
Again you could do this for anything. Um, so SRV again,
search videos. Uh mizler fabric and it should pull up
fabric videos. Yeah. It's got network chuck there. So this
is a basically a way to find any of your
own videos. You could find channels. This way you could
(21:17):
find videos this way you could do like whatever you
want to do. So again, another interface for searching not
just web but also videos. Okay. So the next piece
of functionality I want to talk about is actually my
menu bar. So my menu bar, it's actually got a
bunch of functionality in it. So I've got all these
tools that are up there that are up there. Normally
you might have to zoom in for this one because
(21:38):
the menu bar is just kind of small and I
can't really easily zoom. But I've got this tool called
Hidden Bar, and this came from one of like the
100 videos that I watched about raycast. Some of these
tools are separate, and they just kind of integrate with
raycast and go into the menu bar, and other times
they're just kind of like unrelated. But anyway, hidden bar
(21:58):
or hidden menu. I'm not sure exactly what it's called.
It basically hides and cleans up your menu bar, but
I'm going to go through step by step. This is
actually because I'm recording right now. But look at this.
This is a tool called stats. Stats is kind of
like a free replacement for stat menus. And it basically
works the same. It kind of looks the same. It's very,
(22:19):
very cool. I got you here. One little tidbit for you.
If you go to Raycast Comm and you look at
this little background thing, look at this, look at the
GPU going wild right now. Okay. Yeah. So stepping through
these different things in the top here I've got CPU,
I've got GPU, I've got memory, I've got my disk
(22:43):
and I've got network. And look at this right here.
This is really cool. So right here it tells me
what my next meeting is and it tells me how
long before that happens. And right here it shows me
what I have as well. But it also gives me
a calendar view. So this is like mini calendar. This
is my schedule which is built into raycast. And they're
(23:06):
all putting those there appropriately. And I basically took a
bunch of stuff out of the menu that I didn't
want there and put them there. And this one is
really cool. This came from a video that Pedro had
somebody on and they had this. This is the number
of people that are actively browsing my website like this
exact second. And I could open that up in fathom,
which is the Fathom Analytics platform that allows this to happen.
(23:29):
Then I've got the weather, I've got my notes. This
is my current focus state, and that's pretty much it.
So this is like a collapsed version, which is way
cleaner than that nightmare right there. So menu bar integration
I'm most excited about this one, which shows me my
calendar and my schedule for exactly what I have to
(23:51):
do today, and it's available in one click. And even
better than a click, it's available as a view. So
I could look up and see in an hour and
11 minutes I'm going to talk to Edward. Okay. So
that was the menu bar. All right. Now I want
to show you the thing I actually have been wanting
to show you the whole time, which is the thing
that has most changed my workflow from all the different changes,
(24:14):
like hundreds of different changes that I made with my
toolset and my workflows and my processes, and most importantly,
raycast of all the different ones. I save the best
for last and that is AI integration. So I've done
tons of AI. You've probably seen a bunch of the videos.
If you haven't, please go check them out. But my
core concept with AI, as I talked about before, is
(24:37):
we don't have an AI technology problem. There are a
million different AI websites. There are a million different AI tools,
there's a million different AI utilities. And like, what are
you supposed to do when you have a given problem.
Which tool are you supposed to use? Which utility? Which website?
That's the hardest part. Right. You have anthropic. You have OpenAI,
(24:58):
you have all these different things. And like I said before,
we don't have a capability problem. We have an integration problem.
And with AI it's the absolute worst. Integrating the problems
that you have with the AI that you have is
the hardest thing. And so my first thing that I
was thinking of when I started looking at raycast is like,
(25:19):
how can I get a bunch of my AI stuff
into there? So real quick, I want to pull up
this platform that I built called fabric. So if we
just go to fabric we go to the GitHub. This
is the repo and this is the project and it's
pretty cool. I recommend you check it out on its own. Um,
(25:39):
basically it is a whole bunch of crowdsourced prompts that
do a whole bunch of stuff, uh, solving particular use cases.
There's like cybersecurity use cases. There's like life, uh, use cases.
There's just a million different things that you could do
inside of fabric. And the center of it is these patterns. Okay.
(26:00):
These patterns allow you to do like a million different things.
All right. So let me just go up to the
patterns here. And if I click on patterns and look
at this analyze answers, analyze candidates. Analyze paper analyze spiritual text.
Create better frame like there's a bunch of videos from
other people. Right. So I would say go check these out.
(26:22):
These are integrations. These are problems and solutions to specific
problems that we have in our life. But here's the problem.
You have this problem. Extract recipe, extract questions, extract video ID.
You have this thing that you want to do, but
you're inside of some application. How do you get that
thing from here to there? Right. So what I like
(26:45):
to do is I go and I open up fabric
on the command line because I'm a command line person,
I like that, but that's not for enough people, right?
Not enough people use the command line. A very small
percentage of people are command line first, like I am, right?
And I understand that. So I'm looking for other ways
to integrate. And we've done a couple of different things.
But raycast is the absolute best one. So I'm going
(27:08):
to show you a couple of ways to integrate these
patterns inside of raycast. But first we're actually going to
build up from there. So we're actually going to go
in order. All right let's just skip all that I'm
actually just going to do the fabric one separately afterwards.
Like I said I'm most excited about talking about this
(27:29):
AI stuff. And here's the actual flow for doing this
in a smarter way like I was talking about. So
normally what you do is you do something like, okay,
you launch clod. Okay, so here's a clod application. You
can type into clod. You can get your results back. Cool.
Or you can come over here and you could go
(27:50):
to cloud Sky and you can get your answers from there. Um.
That's Claude. I personally prefer, uh, OpenAI, so that would
be like ChatGPT, but I never go to the website anymore.
I'm not even logged in. I don't go to the
website anymore because of raycast, so check this out. I
(28:13):
told you before in quick searches that I could do
p space something right and search for it. That's cool.
And I also told you you could do g space
and you could search for something on Google. And I
also told you that if you do just whatever search term,
you can actually just do it right from the command line.
And you don't have to do the G, because that
(28:35):
is your default one that you set to the top.
So I just did a search on Google by invoking raycast,
typing the search term and pressing enter so you get
back whatever. Right. So that is really powerful. All right.
So I talked about how you could do that quick
search with Google. Right. So you can just type whatever
(28:57):
here and it's going to go and search that in Google.
But what if I could type like I fabric mizler here.
And instead of pressing enter we know what that would do.
It would be a Google search. Instead I switch over
to the option key and I press enter. Guess what
I just did? I just skipped all those steps of
(29:20):
going to an AI application, calling up like an actual
thick client on the computer, or going to a website
like OpenAI or Claude or Anthropic or whatever, and typing
into a website, right? So rather than clicking or even
using raycast to open the website, I'm bypassing that completely
(29:42):
and just typing it into raycast and instead of pressing
regular enter, I press. And this is configurable option enter
and it brings this up. Okay so let me search.
So let me show you this. Okay. This is insane.
Look it didn't just give me the LM response. And
by the way I'm using Claude three five sonnet for this.
(30:03):
You can configure this to any model that you want
to use. Sonnet I'm using it seems pretty fast. I
like it a lot. So it gives me not only
an LM answer, but look what it did. It gave
me the GitHub for fabric. It gave me my website
to talk more about the introduction to fabric and why
I created it. This is custom raycast built functionality wrapped
(30:26):
around the AI. Okay, so I could click on these
links and guess what? It's going to pull up fabric
the actual um project. It's going to pull up the
actual project because of those links. So again I fabric Mizler. Alt. Enter.
It's going to search it up again. It's probably going
to find similar things or say similar things and find
(30:49):
the same links. Plus eight. Look at this. It found
all these links as well. So I've got all these references.
That is not the crazy part. You want to see
the crazy part. Watch this. Do you see this right here?
I got to actually move my mouse command J. Watch this.
Command J. I just launched into a dedicated AI conversation location. Okay,
(31:13):
so now I can say I don't get it. What
does fabric do? Let me search for a clear explanation
of what fabric does. It's going to go and consume
this whole web page. Think about it. A collection of
pre-made AI prompts called patterns that help users get better
(31:34):
results from AI systems. So again, more links to GitHub
plus all these different links. And now I can just
have a dynamic conversation with my AI about the web
page that I'm on. Okay, so I'm going to go
back to threshold, which is a different app that I built. Um,
what is this, uh, incredible conundrum of life's origin? Okay,
(31:56):
let's go and click on that. Well, that's got a login,
so let's not click on that one. Okay. This guy
is really cool. I follow this guy. Well this is
actually Daring Fireball talking about Simon Willison. But Simon Willison
is a cool AI guy you should check out. He's
basically a developer who talks a lot about AI, but
this is the website. So what is he talking about here? Right?
(32:19):
What is he actually talking about? Here? Watch this. This
is absolutely insane. This is the fastest thing you can
think of some. Oh, I typed three letters, some summarise page.
This is a custom thing that I wrote, which actually
brings it down to one sentence. And I'm going to
show you how to write these in a second. Bring
(32:42):
it down to one sentence. Models got faster, cheaper with
better vision. Audio features while running locally became possible. That's
the one sentence summary. Watch this. This one is actually
built in to raycast. I summarize web page again. It's
pulling from the live web page that I'm on and
it does a full breakdown of the stuff. Okay, I'm
(33:03):
going to go back to my site because I know
the content better. This one's called fast versus slow. I
again I'm on the thing. I'm like, oh, this is
too long. I don't want to read this. This is lame.
I got to go to a meeting in 30s sum
summarize page. What did I actually say here? Fast AI
helps find content, but slow human processing remains vital for
(33:26):
meaningful learning and growth. I actually used a fabric pattern
to make this. Okay, um, I've got another one called
Extract Wisdom e w extract wisdom. This will extract wisdom
using a fabric pattern, which is a prompt which will
pull a summary. The summary is going to be better,
(33:48):
even maybe than the summarize page one that I wrote. Look,
pull all the ideas out of it and it just
keeps going, right? But I could summarize all the different ideas.
I could get quotes out of it. I could do whatever.
If there's something that actually talks about predictions, let's go
to like what's going to have a cool bleeping bleeping
(34:08):
computer bad signature Subaru Starlink flaw. Okay, here we go.
Subaru Starlink flaw lets hackers hijacked cars in US and
Canada extract primary problem. This one is a another fabric
thing that I wrote, which kind of summarizes what this
(34:28):
piece of content thinks is the biggest problem. And it's
a good way of summarizing. In my opinion, connected vehicles
create dangerous security vulnerabilities that expose private data and physical safety. Cool.
Makes sense. And you probably could have got that from
the summary as well. Summarize page. This is probably going
to talk more about the vulnerability security flaw and Subaru.
(34:49):
Starlink allowed company vehicle control through license plates affecting US,
Canada and Japan. Bottom line is I could use any
of my fabric patterns. So watch this. I go back fabric,
go to the GitHub project that we created. Go to
the patterns. I could turn any of these workflows. This
(35:11):
is like hundreds from hundreds of contributors. All these I
could turn into instant things that I could do on
any website, on any block of text. It's just absolutely insane.
So so this workflow is just unbelievable. I no longer
have to go to a web page to start doing
(35:33):
AI stuff. Okay, this is basically my cloud and my I?
OpenAI all built in, but it's inside of raycast. It's.
And I don't use those standalone apps anymore. Um, unless
I'm doing some very specified stuff, like in the playground
for the different platforms when I'm building my own AI workflows.
(35:53):
But in terms of like day to day use, day
to day workflows, I am not using anything except for raycast.
That is how good they have made this right. So again,
the number one workflow is I'm searching the web so
I fabric Meisler enter Google option, enter a search command
(36:18):
J have a conversation about it. Or let's say we're
on another cool website. This is Pedro's website, which by
the way, like I said before is very, very cool.
So I click on writing a website refresh 2023 things
I use. Okay, this is the different stuff that he uses.
I wonder if this is probably the background for the
raycast videos. That background right there? Pretty sure it is,
(36:41):
but he's got all his different stuff here. So this
is a great example. I'm going to show you a
great example of this. He's got this thing. He's got
all these pictures. He's got all the stuff. And it's like, okay, cool.
I just want to know a very specific thing. Okay.
So I'm going to do a some summarize page and
just get a summary. That's probably where I start. And
(37:03):
then if I do command J, I can say what
kind of desk is he using. And of course, yeah,
I could just go over here and read and look
for the desk. So he says fully Jarvis, stand up
desk again. I could just ask the AI and it
could look, this page could have been 200 pages long, right?
And I don't have the time to look for it,
(37:23):
or I don't want to do a command F and
find it. Whatever. Um, again, I can go into more detail.
What kind of cameras does he shoot on? Look at that. Zv-e10.
I haven't even heard of that one. Photography. Yeah. iPhone
15 Pro. Just. You could just dive into content in
(37:45):
and out of content however you want and then watch this.
This is this is insane. So if you go to, uh,
first of all, command comma opens the configuration for any app.
That's just a macOS thing. But look, if you go
to I. So a custom global hotkey I have it
(38:06):
set to option enter. Okay, here's the other main use
case for I not being actually on a website or
copying text, or you're on a current browser tab or something,
but instead you just want to ask AI a question.
I have a custom hotkey set for that. It's the
same command. See it's option option down here, but it's
(38:28):
option A, and again I have that shortcut set up
inside of raycast. So watch this Option A it pops
up my thing. So I do a command n I'm
in a new I session. This is exactly the same
as going to like ChatGPT and starting a new session.
Except for again, you're doing it from raycast instead and
I didn't type raycast and then type something in and
(38:52):
press command or and then pressed option enter. In fact
I just did option A, because option A is the
universal hotkey for opening my AI conversations. Okay, so from
here I could just do any regular AI search that
I'm in an AI conversation. Okay, next thing I want
to talk about I'm going to close that out is
(39:13):
I want to talk about the options. So when you
open raycast. So I'm just going to open raycast. And
if you do command comma this is a universal way
to get to settings in Mac OS. So if I
go to the settings and I go to AI, I
can see that I can edit my universal hotkey for
pulling up AI, which is like I said, option enter.
You could change your model here and it could use
(39:35):
whatever model you want. And again I chat right there
is option A and send message is returned. You can
configure all this. But then if I go to configure
I commands look at all the different commands that I
could use. Search AI commands send screen to I chat.
You can send your current screen to AI and it'll
(39:57):
tell you what's on the screen. Change the tone to casual.
Explain the story explanation. Okay. This is this is a
really cool one. Um, so I'm on this tab story explanation.
This will create a story explanation of the web page
that I'm on. And I wrote this one. This is
actually a fabric integrated one. And it explains it in
(40:19):
a way like you could explain to your grandmother or
whatever and basically have it be a narrative to simplify
whatever it is that you're working on. Um, but that's
just one that I created. So create tone to friendly.
Most of these are actually just already built in. This
one was a fabric one that I added myself. Extract predictions,
(40:41):
extract the primary problem, extract wisdom, find bugs in code,
fix the spelling and grammar. This is all just naturally
built in. And most importantly, create an AI command. Okay,
if I do see a I create AI command. So
now we have a command name. We have a prompt,
(41:03):
we have the model we want to use, and we
can go and save that thing. It's insane. So you
can just keep adding to this list that you see here.
And look at this. If you're worried about sending this
off to a third party, look at this. You could
run it with Obama. If you have Obama running, which
I tend to have a llama running. I don't know
(41:24):
if I have it yet, but I just restarted Obama now,
I could use any of these same things that you're doing.
Improve the writing. Make it longer, make it shorter, whatever
you could call olama with local models and not send
it off anywhere to do that same stuff. So it's
whatever integration you want to use. But long story short,
(41:46):
all of this comes down to raycast being a universal
launcher that allows you to do all this different stuff
we've talked about. All right, so that was just a
few of the main ones that I wanted to talk
about and share with you. Like I said, you can
deep dive in rabbit Hole on this and you will
(42:06):
come back many, many hours later or days later like
I did. And I haven't even started fully configuring all
my AI stuff. I'm actually building a full extension for
fabric to just have the commands for all the patterns
right there. So it's like fuzzy finding. As I'm typing.
I could type in the pattern name and it will
(42:27):
autocomplete for me, and it will run that against the
web page or against the clipboard text or whatever. So
I haven't even started messing with this thing fully, and
I'm already like a hundred times more useful than I
was at the end of 24 before I started this process.
So again, invoke think action happens. And most importantly of
(42:50):
all the extensions, the AI integration have AI right here
available here type type type type option enter and you
are inside of AI. You do command J to continue
the conversation or if you want to start from scratch,
you just do command a. If you set that up
as your alias for AI. And I want to show
(43:10):
you that real quick. So showing you real quick how
to set these up. So basically those are hotkeys. Alias
means you're already inside of raycast. Hotkey means you're invoking
it straight from the operating system. So you're just at
the keyboard, you're invoking it. So if I scroll down
here you're going to see a bunch of these. Option
A is for I chat. So that's like look, so
(43:31):
I'm out here, I'm not doing anything and I do
option A and I'm inside of I with a regular chat.
So that's option A. But I have this for C
which is cursor, I have it for B which is browser,
I have it for lots of different things. So I
have hotkeys configured for lots of different stuff. Again you
(43:52):
can go and set this up to your heart's content. Right.
And and if you are a massive customizer like me,
you're going to want to do a ton of these.
So I've got a ton of these for aliases. I've
got a ton of these for hotkeys. So T.W. this
is thinkers work. Oh yeah. This one's crazy. So look
at this t w tab. This is a fabric one
(44:14):
for thinkers work. This is kind of a diversion. But
whatever I could do this video for like five hours.
So thinkers work. So if I put in Bertrand Russell
in here, it's going to give me a one line
encapsulation of what Bertrand Russell is about. It's going to
give you his most important ideas, the most important works,
to go look at the most important quotes and advice.
(44:37):
So that's a fabric pattern integrated in. And the reason
I'm showing it to you now is because T.W. is
how I get there. So basically I don't have to
type thinkers work or even start typing it. I could
just do T.W. so basically I don't have to type
thinkers work or even start typing it. I could just
(44:57):
do T.W. tab and it automatically knows that. In fact,
I think I could go T.W. space as well. So T.W.
space or T.W. Tab also gets you there. And you
could just put anybody in here and it will summarize
their work and give you back that synopsis. All right.
So that's what I wanted to share with you basically
(45:19):
my new religion of raycast and specifically how to use
AI within raycast. And we'll see you in the next one.
Take care.
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