14 ms·
Shortcat - Keyboard productivity app for Mac OS X
- crazygringo 13y agoAs someone who has tried to come up with a lot of product names... "Shortcat -- killing mice, one at a time." is just genius. Super-kudos to whoever came up with that.
- dClauzel 13y agoExcellent tool! A good complement for QuickSilver. Bonus: the cat is absolutely cute :)
- codex 13y agoI am in love with the idea of this tool. Can't wait to try it.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- lightyrs 13y agoBrilliant.
- alanctgardner2 13y agoI'm seeing a CloudFlare error: DNS Points to Prohibited IP You've requested a page on a website (shortcatapp.com) that is on the CloudFlare network. Unfortunately, it is resolving to an IP address that is creating a conflict within CloudFlare's system. If you are the owner of this website, you should login to CloudFlare and change the DNS A records for shortcatapp.com to resolve to a different IP address. Timestamp: Fri, 07-Jun-13 22:40:20 GMT Requested URL: shortcatapp.com/0 Error reference number: 1000 Server ID: FL_29F5 Process ID: PID_1370644820.240-1-3281482 Edited to remove my personal info.
- _chendo_ 13y agoIt seems to be fine here... anyone else having the problem? The /0 at the end of shortcatapp.com looks a bit odd...
- alanctgardner2 13y agoI feel like that was added by cloudflare... just tried at home, no problems.
- nbouscal 13y agoI had the same problem just now, when I clicked the download link. I went back and clicked it again and it worked fine the second time.
- malandrew 13y agoBeing able to define new shortcuts in real time is awesome, but half the battle. Helping me learn the shortcuts that are already there is the other half. Can you guys add a feature that flashes on the screen the keyboard shortcut that already exist for an action performed via the mouse? Even better if you can add a threshold for an action. For a trivial example, imagine just going to the edit menu and choosing cut/paste/copy. If I perform that action more often than once every 10 minutes, shortcat would flash a fairly large overlay on my screen showing me that shortcut. You could even make this progressive. First teach me any shortcuts for any action performed every 5 minutes for a particular application. Once I learn all those actions, expand the threshold one minute at a time until I learn a new action. Once I consistently perform those actions within the threshold via the keyboard, further increase the threshold until I learn all the commands. How much do you plan on charging?
- _chendo_ 13y agoI actually had this idea before I came up with Shortcat. The problem was that there was no reliable way of linking an action to its keyboard shortcut without installing hooks into an application and tracing all the method calls and seeing which ones match up. If you limited it to clicking the menus in the top where the shortcuts are defined, it's more doable but I personally didn't see much merit in that since I'm terrible at memorising keyboard shortcuts anyway.. :)
- _chendo_ 13y agoI must've missed the charging part. Right now, I've implemented maybe 10% of the features I want to add. I'll be adding licensing soon, but given that most people probably wouldn't pay for features that's not there, I'm probably going to start at $12, then bump it whenever I ship a major feature. Early adopters will end up saving a bit. The licensing will be cheaper when it's in beta too.
- malandrew 13y ago$12? Totally worth it. Might I suggest checking out the Van Westerndorp approach to pricing a product intelligently to make you the most revenue? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Westendorp's_Price_Sensitivity_Meter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Westendorp's_Price_Sensitiv...
- _chendo_ 13y agoHey all, I'm the developer behind Shortcat. Feel free to ask me questions or give me feedback! I'm on a short holiday at the moment so I might not be able to respond super quick. If you do use the app and it crashes, please send a crash report and a short description what you were doing. It helps me a lot figuring out what the problem is. I post up known issues at https://trello.com/board/shortcat-bugs/51ac6a3711f6b34606001d7f https://trello.com/board/shortcat-bugs/51ac6a3711f6b34606001... (public Trello board) so people can vote and comment on issues. I strongly suggest reading the README as I haven't baked in a tutorial to the app just yet.
- terhechte 13y agoGreat Idea, great execution, great name. I love it so far! Thanks a ton!
- malandrew 13y agoYeah, despite my suggestion in my other comment. This is great stuff.
- peatmoss 13y agoDoes it have a "my mind has been poisoned by emacs" mode?
- uncr3ative 13y agoI love this! Would love it even more if it let me choose from the open tabs (the open coversations) in adium...;)
- _chendo_ 13y agoI believe this is an issue with Adium and the way it reports the accessibility details for the tabs. It seems to be the entire tab bar rather than just the tab itself (I use vertical tabs). I haven't found the time to send in a patch just yet as I'm sinking most of it into Shortcat. Hopefully an Adium dev ends up using Shortcat and fixes it!
- ddinh 13y ago
- mitchty 13y agoLooks cool, I'll have to test it out. Should reduce the amount of tab/shift+tab I have to do right now. That said, the video screencast doesn't show up in firefox sans flash player. Not a huge deal but thought you might want to know.
- jhickner 13y agoVery cool! Small suggestion: In the case of selecting an item that's not the topmost, it would be nice if it was a one-step process rather than two (you need to first highlight with ctrl+letter, then activate with Enter). Maybe a repeated press of ctrl+letter could actually activate the selection. Or maybe pressing and holding ctrl+letter for a short while.
- _chendo_ 13y agoThe reason why I'm currently making users explicitly use Enter/Return to click is because this allows them to use modifiers while clicking, so Ctrl+Enter for right click, Cmd+Enter on a link to open it in a new tab, etc. However, I think Ctrl+letter might be interesting, but might be confusing on multi-letter shortcuts.
- hibbelig 13y agoLooks really cool, but doesn't work with Postbox.
- _chendo_ 13y agoThis app relies on applications implementing the Accessibility API properly. I'm hoping that there'll be enough Shortcat users to pressure application developers into making their apps more accessible so people who actually need to use accessibility tools (due to being visually impaired can) use their apps. I've found that most mail clients (apart from Mail.app, which I don't like) have pretty terrible Accessibility support, due to heavy emphasis on custom views. It's still possible to add Accessibility support on custom views though, but visually-impaired users tends to be a pretty small niché unfortunately...
- mwfunk 13y agoIn addition to its other merits, apps like this are a great way to encourage developers implement Accessibility support, which is really not that burdensome at all. If it gets more app developers to support it (even if it's because their users want to use power tools like this), then indirectly, much good will be done for the users who need Accessibility support for its intended purpose. Definitely a win all around.
- swift 13y agoAmazing. This has instantly become a must-have utility for me after trying it out for just a few minutes. Easily the best new Mac utility I've seen in a very long time. I noticed the mention of the "regions" feature in the README, so maybe you already have plans for solving this, but one thing I'd love would be to have a way to select something based in part on its proximity to something else. For example, imagine I want to click on the comments link for a particular story on the HN front page. It'd be more intuitive to me to type, say, "Shortcat#comments" to pick the item that matches "comments" nearest the item that matches "Shortcat", than to type "comments" and hit Control to select the correct link.
- _chendo_ 13y agoThanks! Regions needs a bit more thought, but it'll let you narrow down the search space easier when you're using a complex app like Xcode with a billion different scrollviews. That's actually a pretty cool idea! I had ideas for sorting by depth in the element tree to current active or moused over element, but a proximity-based search would be interesting. What operator would you think is meaningful? I haven't got plans for '#' just yet.
- swift 13y agoI'm not sure what the best operator would be for my suggestion, but after thinking about it '/' would work well since it calls to mind the idea of navigating a hierarchy. 'Shortcat/comments' feels nice to me. It can also be typed without using shift on a US keyboard, which is convenient.
- _chendo_ 13y agoI'll be adding '/' down the track for a proper hierarchy, but things that are close to each other aren't guaranteed to be in a sane hierarchy. What about '@'? "comments@shortcat" kinda flips it around first, which could work as you might decide to narrow down the query when you see too many results. A possible problem is that the second part of the query also has too many results.
- lostpixel 13y agoVery nice. On your readme page you mention that with sublime text nothing works. I presume the onus will be on Sublime text developers to make their tabs available to the assit API? EDIT: On further inspection of README this is somewhat covered. /sleepy
- emehrkay 13y agoWorks with TextMate 2 and 1's file browser, not tabs
- colbyh 13y agoA very good compliment to Quicksilver indeed. This will be invaluable when I'm in browser tab hell and need to find one specifically. A menu bar icon would be appreciated!
- _chendo_ 13y agoThe menu bar icon is coming back in the next version (v0.4.3) :)
- grandalf 13y agothis is fantastic!
- jaxbot 13y agoI'll be the one to say it. Awesome. Anything like this for Linux or Windows?
- christiangenco 13y agoOh wow, this is brilliant. My only problems with it are that it doesn't work with some applications, which is the perfect problem to have, because it means I can now identify applications that have accessibility issues that I didn't notice before. Demand for accessible apps increases -> I become more productive and apps become more accessible for people that need them. Perfect!
- _chendo_ 13y agoThat's the idea! I've had a few emails from a few devs of Mac apps and they're going to fix up some issues
- vincevip 13y agoI think it awesome product with brilliant.
- oakaz 13y agoIt's what exactly what I've been wishing for years. Does it work in web browsers ?
- _chendo_ 13y agoIt works in Safari pretty well and Chrome if you run it with a certain flag (see README). I'm not sure about Firefox at this point though.
- EragonJ 13y agoIt's really a nice tool to use with. It's as awesome as Alfred !!
- dantiberian 13y agoI must be doing something wrong but I can't see how to select an element or button by the letter over it's highlight. Ctrl+Letter doesn't do anything for me. From the README, that seemed to be the way to do it?
- rbnio 13y agoIf there are multiple highlighted elements on screen, Ctrl-Letter lets you select which element is highlighted green. The green element can then be activated/selected with Enter. As others already suggested, the possibility of directly activating a specific element by shortcut would be great. Awesome app nonetheless!
- jcromartie 13y agoI can see this being an OS X power-user/accessibility feature in the next major release. Enjoy your acquisition and/or idea being brazenly appropriated.
- m_ke 13y agoAwesome, goes great with vimium for chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogbaibhgnhhndojpepiihcmeb https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...
- rodly 13y agoSo if I type in '.' and see the control I want to specify listed as 'C', how do I tell Shortcat to activate 'C'? I tried obviously typing in ".C" or just "C" but neither work. /missed something obvious
- mikeroher 13y agoAny way this can be "downgraded" for Snow Leopard? I hate the iOSification Lion and Mountain Lion have gone through. I like my vintage Expose with the Dashboard disabled.
- shurcooL 13y agoThis is cool. Nice name. I've already been doing something like this in browsers for some time: Cmd+F Type Enter/Shift+Enter to go next/prev result (or Cmd+G/Cmd+Shift+G) When it highlights the link you want to press: Esc, Enter Of course the beauty of this app is that it works outside the browser too.
- Sealy 13y agoWho did the cute little cat design?
- samweinberg 13y agoIt's like Ctrl + F meets Vimium.
- kozikow 13y agoYou can setup similar functionality in vimium - Just set " Use the link's name and numbers for link hint filtering" in vimium's advanced options. It's default way to move around vimperator as well.
- Siecje 13y agoIs there something like this for Linux?
- domodomo 13y agoYou've nailed it here, outstanding job. Any chance of defining a custom selection key other than ctrl? On my Macbook air, holding the control key with my pinky or thumb while I type is really awkward. Shift would seem more natural, as the pinky finger is already used to using this as a modifier, no?
- cyan_atrus 13y agowhile you're waiting, you can remap the caps lock key to ctrl (type cmd-space, then "caps lock" and open the Keyboard preferences item that comes up).
- _chendo_ 13y agoThanks! Hmm, probably. I used to use Shift but the problem was there are languages where they need to use Shift to be able to type more letters (Thai for example), so it wouldn't let them type other languages. I could probably add it as an option though, but you wouldn't be able use capital letters, naturally heh
- gdonelli 13y agoMade me think of an App I wrote a while ago with the opposite objective, never touch the keyboard to launch an app. (SapiensApp.com).
- tommorris 13y agoAs someone who tries to avoid mice for RSI-related reasons, this looks amazing. Thank you.
- septerr 13y agoGreat idea and product. I will gladly pay for it. One of the biggest issues I had when transitioning from pc to mac was the lack of meaningful shortcuts. This would have eased the pain greatly! I could not figure out how to click an element when using . to highlight all elements.
- hankcharles 13y agoThe reviews for this are one of the more enticing reasons of late for me to switch off of linux. I'm really excited about this. great stuff!
- johncoltrane 13y agoNice. It looks like a system-wide EasyMotion.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- knes 13y agoAn integration with [alfredapp](http://alfredapp.com http://alfredapp.com) would be so awesome! Hope you can get in touch with them!
- NicholasMurray 13y agoWhich came first? The name or the product? Both are outstanding.
- birgander 13y agoLove it. This is a great app! One thing I'm missing though - settings for colors. I have color vision deficiency and it's very hard for me to see which element is selected.
- Maert 13y agoAny chance of this being made/ported for Windows platform?
- wesley 13y agoHow are you able to query the accessiblity api so fast? In my experience, it's awfully slow.
- i_s 13y agoace-jump-mode.el for OSX. Nice.
- oogali 13y agocommand+shift+{ command+shift+} ?
- tomflack 13y agoI subscribed to your newsletter (life is too short for beta software, but once it hits 1.0 I'm all over it!) and you're on Elizabeth Street! I'm based out of Canberra at the moment, but it's great to see local guys pop up on HN occasionally.