Raycast’s confetti cannon
Among many genuinely useful deeplinks you can use to control Raycast from afar in a simple way, I just spotted an interesting one:
raycast://confetti
This is what it does:
Despite it being a confetti cannon and nothing more, I think it goes deeper than stuff like e.g. Asana’s “celebration creatures”, and it deserves recognition for three actually kinda serious reasons:
- You can use it to quickly test whether you’re wiring deeplinks correctly. It’s clever the Raycast team put it at the beginning of the doc page; I think every API or a complex connection method should have a simple and delightful “success scenario” for two reasons: to celebrate you establishing that connection, and to have something so simple it cannot itself be misbehaving (this way you know that if you can’t get confetti to work, you for sure messed up something elsewhere).
- Once you know how to invoke it from far away, it’s also great for testing other things. Sounds can be muted. In JavaScript,
console.log()can be too buried if you don’t have a console open or visible, andalert(“Test”)is kind of depressingly old-school and steals focus. This HUD-like thing feels like a modern way of approaching this: You know you’ll notice it when it fires away, and it will leave no lasting damage. (Okay, fair, it does steal focus too, so that’d be one thing to improve.) - It has great production value. I hate perhaps all of Google’s search easter eggs because they’re built so extremely cheaply – try searching for “do a barrel roll” or “askew” (and no, I’m not going to dignify them with links because links are my love language). It’s rare and worth celebrating when something that could very well be an internal joke or a test feature for nerds is actually something you want to use because it’s so well-made. (See also: Linear’s internal testing UI.)
