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Amazing. 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 lo

by swift 13y ago

Amazing. 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 ago
Thanks! 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 ago
  I'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 ago
    I'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.
    - swift 13y ago
      That sounds like a good approach!

by swift 13y ago

_chendo_ 13y ago

Thanks! 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 ago
I'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 ago
  I'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.
  - swift 13y ago
    That sounds like a good approach!