Build your own extensions

From the beginning of Raycast, we were keen to provide an API to build extensions for the app. Paired with a strong developer community, we believe in growing an ecosystem of productivity tools for individuals and teams. Today we're announcing our developer program that offers early access to this API. Fill out a short survey and help us to take on this next milestone.

We know that we can’t build all extensions in Raycast ourselves. A lot of highly-rewarding productivity tools are custom to the setup of individuals, teams or organizations. Some of those setups are even behind intranets or firewalls. Instead, we can serve the toolkit a developer community needs, to shape the ecosystem of productivity tools they desire.

We've already taken the first steps with our beta testers:

1. Community: Our community is a place for like-minded productivity nerds. They can suggest new features, exchange ideas and get to know each other. This was crucial for our private beta and we will use it as our primary communication channel for everything related to the API.
2. Script Commands: Raycast can be already extended with Script Commands. At it's core, the commands are scripts that are indexed and searchable from the app. The scripts can be written in Bash, Swift, Javascript or any other environment that is locally available. They provide little productivity boosts throughout the day and vary from opening bookmarks of favorite websites to dashboards about engineering metrics. On top, they can be shared via repositories within teams or organizations.

Script Commands are just the beginning of extending Raycast. With our API we want to enable developers to build much richer experiences. They will have advanced user interfaces with keyboard shortcuts similar to the built-in Jira or GitHub extensions.

We're still in the early days and focus on three topics:

1. No-brainer to build UI: Our opinionated user experience is the canvas for all extensions. Lists, forms and actions are very flexible and scalable. Developers shouldn't care about pushing pixels and concentrate on delivering the business logic.
2. Security out of the box: We care about security as well as privacy. Authorizing with third party services is common nowadays. Secrets, API tokens or credentials will be treated as first class citizens.
3. Easy to share: After hacking together a tool for yourself, the next step is to generalize it and share it with your team-mates or our community. These transitions shouldn't take any effort.

The above are not easy tasks and it takes a whole community to pull it off. We're in the early days of designing the API. Signing up for the developer program gives you a saying in how the developer experience should be.

We can't wait to lift Raycast to the next level with all of you!