‘Shortcat’ utility replaces mouse clicks with keyboard presses

Categories: technology
Tags: clickable images, clickable text, graphical-user interfaces (GUIs), haptic feedback, keyboard, keyboard presses, keyboard shortcut, menu bar, mouse, mouse clicks, point and click, Shortcat, trackpad, utility

As a visual person, this is completely counterintuitive to me, but others may find it useful.

At a Glance

Shortcat 0.4.3.1If you’re a keyboard junkie, Shortcat allows you to use keys to access almost any any onscreen element, avoiding a mouse or trackpad (almost) altogether.

Nearly two decades after it first made an appearance on my desk, the mouse has yet to gain my favors. Modern graphical-user interfaces (GUIs) make its use practically mandatory, but I use it only when I have no other choice.

My dislike for pointing and clicking is not just a matter of reliving the good old days, when the only way to use computers was to type for hours on end—uphill, both ways—but rather a simple consequence of the fact that, unlike the mouse or trackpad, a keyboard gives me haptic feedback that allows me to type without looking.I mention all this to help explain why Shortcat caught my eye. This little utility promises to let you use the keyboard to perform many operations, such as clicking textual links on a Web page, that normally require a pointing device.

Shortcat adds a systemwide menu to your menu bar (though you can turn this off) and lets you choose a global keyboard shortcut (I stuck with the default Command+Shift+Space). When you press that shortcut, Shortcat displays a small text-input box at the bottom of the screen.

As you start typing in the box, the app examines the contents of the active window (which gets a faint outline to confirm which window is being examined) and looks for actionable text items—buttons, checkboxes, files, and so on—that match the text you’ve typed. Shortcat matches in a variety of ways, including the first few letters of a word, or the initials of the words in a phrase (for example, typing LA will match both “later” and “load all”). Shortcat is clever enough to differentiate between regular text and “clickable” text (onscreen elements that can be clicked), and it can even detect items that have hidden textual content attached to them, such as clickable images with ALT tags on a Web page.