TIL: Command K Bars in Any App via Raycast

Last updated: Wed Aug 02 2023

I really like the Command-K bar UI pattern - many apps these days, including VS Code and Obsidian, provide a single keyboard shortcut to open a typeahead exposing most commands you can perform and settings you can toggle.

Thanks to Raycast, you can get this behavior in pretty much any Mac app! Raycast has a built-in plugin for “Search Menu Items”, which exposes a typeahead for all the menu bar items exposed by any Mac app, which also shows the keyboard shortcut for each option. Luckily, most well-behaved Mac apps expose most of their functionality through the menu bar items, so this is pretty much as good as a “real” Command-K bar. I’ve bound this to Cmd-Shift-P, which doesn’t conflict with most apps’ own keyboard shortcuts.