Shortcat: Item chooser done right

By aaron ramirez, 22 October, 2022

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

So the other day, I stumbled upon this neat little app. It's been designed for sighted people who prefer keeping their hands on the keyboard to increase their productivity. As the subject suggests, it does exactly what VO's item chooser does. As a lot of us who use item chooser know, it can be slow in apps that have a ton of elements and tends to break in weird ways. Unfortunately, when I tried it, it was basically inaccessible. The UI elements were all perfectly labeled, but when you typed in the search box, VO didn't automatically read the search results. I emailed the developer, and within two days, they released an update that fixed this problem. I've been playing with the update for a few minutes, and it's already much faster than the item chooser is and it's also feeling more consistent. The best part is that it uses the mouse not the VO cursor, and it supports left clicks, right clicks, double clicks, etc. I intend to add this to the app directory but I really want other people to try it first in case there's some bugs I'm not immediately noticing. Let me know what you all think!

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Comments

By Squirrel on Sunday, October 30, 2022 - 23:26

Thanks for pointing us towards this application.

I've only spent a few minutes with it, and my immediate reaction was to be a little confused. I guess that not being a regular user of the item chooser doesn't help here. The application is also having to contend with several years worth of muscle memory with using Alfred.

My guess is that the above won't leave much space for Shortcat to find a place in my workflow, but I definitely appreciate it being there as another option in my tool box.