Launching a Raycast extension for Drafts

Drafts for Mac
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If you use Raycast on your Mac this post might be useful for you :slight_smile:

I jumped into the rabbit hole of building my first extension for Raycast to integrate it with Drafts - which was quite a fun experience :raised_hands:t4::raised_hands:t4:

If you’re a user of Raycast this can (significantly) speed up your workflows for Drafts.

You can download it from the Raycast store when you search for “Drafts” or with this link

In this first version It supports the following features (=Commands):

Create Draft :writing_hand:

  • create drafts in a Raycast form with tags.

Append/Prepend to Draft :arrow_down::arrow_up:

  • Configure Drafts you often want to append / prepend text to.
  • To configure a Draft you need to copy its UUID in Drafts from the Info Menu of the Draft. You can choose a title that should be displayed in Raycast for this Draft and select if you want to prepend or append text to that Draft.
  • When you configured Drafts you can quickly prepend / append text to the selected Draft in the list.
  • It is also very easy to create a Raycast Quicklink to perform the prepending / appending even faster.

Create Draft from Clipboard :page_facing_up:

  • Creates a new Draft with the current Clipboard text as content.

Create blank Draft :new:

  • Quickly create a new empty Draft and open it in Drafts app.

Run Draft Action :dash:

  • Configure Actions you want to run from Raycast.
  • Depending on your configuration Raycast will ask for text input you want to provide to the Drafts Action or run the Action without any text input.

Open Drafts Workspace :milky_way:

  • Configure Workspaces you want to quickly open from Raycast.
  • You can configure as many workspaces as you like by their name and open them from the workspaces list in Raycast.
  • In the Action Panel of each configured workspace you can also create a Raycast Quicklink for the workspace to open it even faster.

Dictate Draft :studio_microphone:

  • Open the dictation interface in Drafts to quickly create a new Draft from dictated text.

Create Drafts Quicklink :link:

This is a helper command to easily create additional Raycast Quicklinks to perform the following actions:

  • create a draft
  • open the quicksearch in Drafts
  • search in the drafts list
  • search in the Action list
  • capture text with Drafts capture window
  • open the dictation window

If you want to provide some feedback, find any issues or have additional requests just reply below or reach out to me on Twitter.

7 Likes
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I’m a big fan / user of Raycast, so will check this out. Thanks.

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Great :+1:t3: me too!
Let me know if you miss something

5

This is great. Is is possible to automatically add the date to the draft, just before the added text.

e.g [DATE] This is the new text
[DATE] More text

Just helps to know when the text was added. I can do this with Alfred, so not sure if possible using Raycast.

6

Should be possible yes!
You could for now create a snippet to insert the date into a command that you’re using :slight_smile:
I have a snippet for the ISO date YYYY-MM-DD which will be inserted when I type „dt1“

7

Thank you. Will give that a try

1 Like
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So, now I have Raycast, Spotlight, and Alfred - all mapped to hot key combos. (As you’d expect.)

Anything to prefer your Raycast one over (I think) @sylumer’s Alfred one? (Sorry if I’ve misattributed the latter.)

The only thing I can think of is a Raycast extension might be harder to modify. But then again it might not.

9

ouch, I think I missed that answer long ago so if its no longer relevant ignore my reply :wink:

I don’t think we need to talk about if the Raycast extension is better than the Alfred workflow. If you’re happy with the Alfred workflow and more importantly Alfred in general there is no need to switch to Raycast. The Alfred workflow is far more powerful since it can access data in Drafts…
If you (or somebody else) doesn’t use Alfred (usability or cost-wise) but Raycast instead, the Raycast extension might help you to speed up some workflows :slight_smile:

10

I updated the Raycast extension for Drafts with the new command Create Draft from Selection that will create a new draft from the currently selected text :partying_face:. It was a suggestion by a user of it, and I (finally) took some time to add it and really enjoy using it!

Should be updated automatically if you use the it already. If not you can download it from the Raycast store

1 Like