After using Alfred for many years, I’m now a big fan of Raycast. It’s just so polished and there are many, equally polished, extensions in their store. Recently, I’ve contributed two extensions myself that have massively increased my productivity:
Switching between projects
Because I have to switch between projects quite often, this extension saves me a lot of time:
I’ve parked Laravel Herd in several locations on my computer, which automatically makes the folders inside available as folder.test domains. My extension fetches these folders from Herd and displays them in an alphabetical list. From there, I can open the folder in Finder, open the .test URL in the browser, or most importantly, open the project in my code editor. In the latest release, I’ve also made the editor configurable.
Using a hotkey, ⇪ + o in my case, this makes switching between projects a breeze. I don’t even have to bother adding the project to my editor anymore. Once I add a folder, it’s available from anywhere.
Tracking time
Tracking time is not necessarily something I enjoy, so I have to make it as easy as possible. In fact, switching time tracking apps (or building my own) has become something of a guilty pleasure for me. After working on this extension, my tracking has become much, much more consistent. And it feels like I’ve finally arrived:
The extension, integrating with the time tracking app Tyme, already existed and it was the reason why I tried Tyme in the first place (thanks, @melkstam!). Tyme’s interface is okay and I really like their menubar item, but it can be a bit finicky to start/stop tasks. That’s where this extension comes in.
After using it for some time, I noticed the performance with >100 projects was not great — so I rebuilt it from the ground up! It’s now super snappy and you can even add projects and tasks on the fly. Now I don’t have to touch Tyme at all, only when I look at the times I’ve tracked to create invoices.
What’s next
I’ve been using these extensions daily for a few months now, and they’ve saved me a lot of Tyme time. In this rare case, they might have even saved me more time than I spent building them. But there are still a few rough edges I want to smooth out.
For the Herd extension, I’m wondering if it should turn into a full fletched mini Herd. Switching PHP versions, starting/stopping services, … but I’m not sure if that’s worth the effort.
The Tyme extension could have an option to set the starting time to something else than “now”. I still have to use the menubar for that. And yes, I tend to forget starting the timer a lot.
It might even be cool to combine the two of them with Raycast’s new AI extensions… 🤔
If you end up trying either of these, let me know what you think on Mastodon. I’m curious if they solve similar pain points for you or if you have ideas for improvements.