Raycast extension for Gather

You can grab it for free on the Raycast Store.

Why this extension?

For non-Gather users, it's a really cool app that makes remote work easier by bringing teams the tools needed to build their own virtual space. We love it at Specify and use it on a daily basis, it's the ideal solution for us when it comes to meetings, workshops or just coffee chats.

But I found myself always a bit stuck when it comes to alternating between focus sessions, meetings and AFK moments, especially when I'm using the small window app (kind of a picture-in-picture mode) instead of the default and bigger one. Also, as an AZERTY user, shortcuts are not correctly mapped to my keyboard, which is very frustrating.

Building the extension

Back to my Raycast extension for Gather. It was quite easy, Raycast's documentation is really simple to understand and the Get Started guide helps me a lot in quickly configuring my extension. Quite an impressive work behind this delightful experience, you can be proud of yourself Raycast Team!

I never wrote TypeScript before but as mentioned in the documentation, if you're familiar with JavaScript it's really easy to build what you had in mind, plus there are already tons of extensions you can look at, see source code and find your answers.

My extension being based on keyboard shortcuts, I just needed to write AppleScript lines to perform the corresponding keystroke combinations for Gather and voilà, extension is ready.

S/O to Per Nielsen Tikær who helped me by making sure users have Gather installed before executing commands. Believe it or not, I didn't think about it in my initial pull request, but we learn by making!

What's next?

Good question, happy to hear what you are looking for! If you have any idea of interesting command(s) for Gather as a Raycast extension, feel free to send me message on Twitter, I would be more than happy to discuss about it with you!

On my side, I try to code something that will allow you to provide a serie of movement instructions to get in your desired meeting room and then you'll only need to execute a Raycast command to join it. I am only thinking about it for the moment, we'll see.