Welcome to the first episode of tools we use! This is a new series that highlights the indispensable apps that we use at Empathy on a daily basis.

Raycast is an app launcher. It runs in the background and makes it easy to launch other apps. The Windows Start menu is the most famous application launcher. Apple's Spotlight tool has been built into the Mac and iPhone for over a decade now.

So why use (and pay) for a third party tool? Flexibility and power, and Raycast offers both in spades.

Raycast goes beyond launching apps - it also lets you perform actions in them. Let's say I want to play music on a particular Sonos speaker. I can open the Sonos app and select the speakers I want to play music from. Or, I can tell Raycast to send music to a speaker with one command, with no need to launch the Sonos app.

This power comes from Raycast's extensions. They let developers write commands that hook into other programs. Most popular applications have extensions, and I get a lot of joy from adding new ones to my toolkit.

Some of these extensions go beyond app shortcuts. The pro version offers a built-in AI chatbot that you can access with one keystroke. I’m a paid ChatGPT user, but the convenience of one-click access to a chatbot makes this my got-to for short queries. The paid version also has a built-in translation tool, clipboard history, and can sync your extensions and customizations.

Programmers constantly search for ways to speed up tasks and reduce mouse use. Raycast is designed from the ground up to do this, and is a must-have in my toolkit.