How I use the new Spotlight

So. Raycast is a replacement for Apple's Spotlight, a quick search accessible anywhere in macOS with ⌘+Space. It is "extendable", in that it has an in-app extensions library which add entries which do various things. This is useful in various ways, but I mostly use it to quick-search various websites, like Kagi or MDN.

In macOS Tahoe, Apple lets you run "Shortcuts" from Spotlight. These can take a text input directly in Spotlight, and run basically whatever. One decent use for this is to run something like brew update to update your packages.

What are "Shortcuts"? Imagine if Scratch was integrated into your OS. You can organise blocks to make a kind of annoying form of computing. It has strange limitations.
A screenshot of the Shortcuts app showing a basic procedure to search a website from an input.
A simple shortcut. Useful, though!

One neat thing is that you can bind a shortcut to a.... shortcut? Like, they call this "Quick Keys", but it's like a shortcut alias. If I want to search Kagi, I can make a kg alias, then kg↩︎Foo to search "Foo" on Kagi.

A screenshot of Spotlight showing a shortcut asking for input.

That's basically it. Shortcuts are kind of fun to make, but can be a bit infuriating if you don't know how to use the esoteric blocks. On macOS, you can at least fall back to sh, or a scripting language like Python.

A screenshot of the Shortcuts app with all the Spotlight shortcuts.
Here's all the shortcuts I've made so far. Can't really think of any more I could make.
drawing of a deer, talking to you.

This kinda works for me. There's definitely more that Raycast can do that Shortcuts can't right now, but it's pretty decent right now! Definitely enough for me to stop using it. Your use case is probably different, though. I know a lot of people would hate a workflow like this, and prefer to use the browser and/or the CLI.