Shortcat – Manipulate macOS masterfully, minus the mouse | Hacker News Reader

Shortcat – Manipulate macOS masterfully, minus the mouse

shortcat.app

68 pointsfcoury22 comments

Nice! I've been using Tridactyl in Firefox for ages and was always yearning for something like this

/e: "TL;DR: Shortcat collects diagnostic data for the purposes of product improvements only, using self-hosted services.". Yeah, f*ck you. You can't opt out of it. Won't use it then.

Im reading about tridactyl rn and think I might propose to whoever wrote this plugin.

"yy — copy the current page URL to the clipboard"

YESSS

Really cool idea. I'm not finding any links to source. Is this proprietary? I can't recall if brew allows proprietary stuff so that threw me off.

I recall something like this for GNU/Linux, but I don't think I ever got it working. I remember you had to set your DE to Unity (just via an env var), and then I think you could access the contents of menus via rofi once set up right. I have a script like the emoji selector already, but being able to select buttons and menus in arbitrary graphical programs seems like the real killer feature here.

I can't recall if brew allows proprietary stuff so that threw me off

I’ve installed lots of commercial/proprietary apps using Homebrew. Heck, you can even “brew install microsoft-office”.

This is great. Reminds me of QuickSilver[1]. I'm evaluating HomeRow[2] for a VIM driving the Mac OS, will try this as well.

I love how:

a. accessibility features are making the OS more accessible for everyone through automation

b. good the accessibility implementation is on the Mac that most applications are inherently compatible with solutions like this.

[1]: https://qsapp.com/

[2]: https://www.homerow.app/

Homerow's creator used to be a Shortcat user! He went with a more-vim like interaction model which optimises for minimal keystrokes whereas Shortcat's design goal is to minimise cognitive overhead

Ah ha. Makes sense. Thanks for that tidbit.

This reminds me of the browser plugin Vimium which gives VIM bindings to the browser, but this is for the whole OS! Looking forward to giving this a try.

If you like this, you might also like https://superkey.app/

Anyone tried both and can compare? They seem quite similar at first glance...

One difference I noticed:

Shortcat: “Shortcat leverages the Accessibility API used in macOS, used by VoiceOver and other screen readers, to be able to expose UI elements, menus, apps, and windows as a list for you to search through and action.”

Superkey: “[The] Seek [feature] uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to find your text, and there are currently some limitations to this. It has a particularly difficult time with certain shades of blue text on black background, small text, and text close to lines.”

I just tried both. I like how Superkey works better (ie: it points to what you're about to click) but it couldn't find a a LOT of text on the screen making it not very useful. I'm not sure if there's an issue on my end or what.

I'm thinking about doing something similar to highlight where Shortcat's about to click cause I do agree that it could be better in that aspect. The amount of elements Shortcat will be able to pick up will be far greater than an OCR-based solution though

So I’ve been using Shortcat for a couple of days and I changed my mind. I think it’s superior to Superkey in almost every way. But I do like how Superkey points to the target. It’d be a great feature to add. Thanks for your great work!

Please consider making the example animated images clickable to view a full-screen version so they are more legible in mobile.

Will do

Last week I installed Vim-like keyboard navigation extensions for several apps (Vimium on Firefox, VSCodeVim on Visual Studio Code, Vim Shortcuts for Logseq), would love to see one for the Linux desktop itself but I don't think it exists.

This looks like advanced technology on the order of the Minority Report UIs.

Count me in to try it!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=PJqbivkm0Ms

This app is great and should have made it to the front page

This is cool but I don't trust it to not spy on me

I hope that big Tweet button is contextual, and not part of the default input box…

I think that is a Twitter client window, it’s not the shortcat UI (which pops up briefly a bunch of times during the animation I think you are taking about, which is illustrating like an emoji completion feature)

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