07 Jun 2004 | Print  |

Ergonis's KeyCue Offers Keyboard Shortcut Cheat Sheet

by Matt Neuburg

Ergonis's KeyCue Offers Keyboard Shortcut Cheat Sheet -- KeyCue is a simple but ingenious Mac OS X application from Ergonis Software, makers of the invaluable PopChar X (see "Panther-Prepared PopChar Published" in TidBITS-699). Taking advantage of Panther's Accessibility API (which I described in "Scripting the Unscriptable in Mac OS X" in TidBITS-670), KeyCue reads through the menu items of the frontmost application, finds those that have keyboard shortcuts, and displays a window listing them when you hold down the Command key for a few seconds. A serious shortcoming of the menu paradigm, after all, is that it requires you to open each menu one at a time to hunt for a shortcut or menu item, with the result that you never get a conspectus of an application's shortcuts, and you probably never bother to memorize most of them because, having found the menu item you want, you then just choose it with the mouse. Using KeyCue for a little while, I find, quickly helps me remember the shortcuts for the menu items I use most often; and of course it also gives me a fast way, without hunting in the menus, to access the shortcuts I don't memorize and use less often. KeyCue isn't yet quite the utility I was hoping for; what I really want is a cheat sheet that lets me see and choose from all of an application's menu items, whether or not they have shortcuts, and I'd also like a cheat sheet showing all the global "hot keys" that various applications have installed. But it's certainly a big help, and the $15 pricing is reasonable. You can download a demo version (659K) to try for yourself; it shows all available shortcuts only for the first 10 invocations, after which it hides some of the shortcuts. [MAN]

<http://www.ergonis.com/products/keycue/>
<http://www.ergonis.com/products/popcharx/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/07372>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/07102>

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