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Comment by ChrisLTD | Hacker News Reader

Shortcat is my favorite of these sorts of apps. I just wish there was a way to make all of them faster. The delay between requesting the link hints and then actually displaying on screen is painful enough that I haven’t been able to incorporate it into my workflow.

Most of these apps seem to tie into MacOS’s accessibility framework for the hinting, and I’m guessing the delay is being caused by waiting for and then acting on these response from that framework.

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There's a customizable delay in Shortcat that you may have set. Otherwise, buy an M2 Air like mine and see it fly :-)

I have it set to immediate, and I'm using it on a M1 Pro machine :-D

Just tried this one, works great on M1 Max. No delays.

I'm using it on a M1 Max and it's pretty slow to initialize the yellow key options... even when the setting is on "immediate".

I took a screencast: https://imgur.com/a/xL5CgJ2

With Vimium when you hit "f" it actually appears immediately. It takes a full second with Shortcat.

Yep, this is exactly what I'm talking about.

The app in the screencast is Firefox; if you run Accessibility Inspector.app and try to inspect, for instance, the "NN minutes ago" link text in your comment, this is what it looks like in Firefox [0] and this is what it looks like in Safari [1].

Firefox (and Chrome) look like giant completely opaque windows to the macOS accessibility API, the only things you can "see" to click on are the close/minimize/maximize buttons, whereas Safari exposes its entire interface and a lot of the web page to the API.

It looks like Homerow is somehow scraping a short list of apps, "Popular non-native apps such as Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Arc, Visual Studio Code, Spotify, Slack, Discord, and Obsidian are supported. I'm working on supporting more non-native apps." I don't know how shortcat etc do it.

[0] https://snap.philsnow.io/2023-04-05T10-04-07.bmgoq2rkwxqmy28... [1] https://snap.philsnow.io/2023-04-05T10-01-44.gdj1z3ukbq712zw...

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