KeyCue

Emacs was my text editor of choice for many years.

We used to joke that the name stood for ‘escape, meta, alt, control, shift’; emacs uses a ton of key modifiers, being from an era when spiffy window and mouse based systems didn’t exist. It took a while to get used to, but when you were finally in the groove, you could really fly with it — editing is naturally quite fast when you never have to remove your hands from the keyboard.

The Mac has taken this philosophy to a high art; there are shortcut keys for everything.

Now, I suppose after a year or so on a Mac, these will have become second nature, but as a recent switcher, I’m finding that it’s taking a while to retrain my fingers. Now, obviously, there are menu choices for everything I want to do, but that’s the slow road; for common applications, I want to get used to using the keyboard shortcuts.

Learning these via the menu entries is tedious. The act of moving the mouse, going to the appropriate menu, locating the command, and observing the shortcut key combination is just too much of an interruption for my feeble attention span. By the time I’ve done all that, my train of thought has derailed.

However, there is a very cool alternative that works quite well for me.

KeyCue is a utility which monitors the command key. If command is held down for a short time, the desktop dims and a window pops up, listing keyboard shortcuts currently available.

As an example, here’s the shortcut display window with Camino as the foreground application:

Very slick indeed. Crisp, well-organized, easy to read, and my hands are still on the keyboard. I’m starting to remember the key shortcuts quite easily now that I don’t have to jump through hoops to determine what they are.

KeyCue offers multiple themes and is very configurable. Frankly, this is just so useful, I’m surprised that it’s not part of the OS already.

One downside is that the trial period is quite short. After only a few activations, KeyCue greeks most of the displayed shortcuts and asks for registration. Personally, I find this approach to be a bit draconian, since I think the application sells itself.

It would also be nice to have the application configuration present itself as a system preference panel; at present, it’s a hidden background application.

KeyCue is $19.99 USD or Euro. Registration was painless, and a registration key was provided instantly via the checkout page. However, strangely, the key is apparently not sent to the customer email address, so it’s important to retain a copy of the checkout page. While this is good advice in any case, the lack of an email invoice and key information is a bit unusual.