This App Lets You Use Your Mac Without Ever Touching the Mouse

Most things are faster to do with the keyboard than with the mouse, but not every app is built with the keyboard in mind. That’s where where Shortcat comes in. This free Mac application allows you to quickly search for and click things like buttons, links, and fields in applications, all in a few keystrokes. There’s a bit of a learning curve, granted, but once you get past that it can speed up almost anything you do on your computer.

Shortcat is triggered with a keyboard shortcut—by default, CMD-Shift-Space. Trigger this shortcut and you’ll see a search bar and yellow boxes with two-letter codes for everything in the menu bar and every clickable item in the current window.

Credit: Justin Pot

Search for the thing on the screen—either by typing the two-letter code or by just typing for the thing you’re looking for. When you see the thing that you want to “click,” simply hit enter—the result will be just as though you’d moved the mouse and clicked that item. You’re not limited to clicking: you can double-click by hitting enter twice quickly or right-click by holding Control when you press enter.

Credit: Justin Pot

This works with native Mac applications, which is to be expected, but I was delighted to learn that it also works in web browsers. You can, for example, search for a link you want to open and then hit enter to open it.

Credit: Justin Pot

This works not only in the browser but in Electron apps. It’s okay if you don’t know what that means—this is relatively obscure stuff—but to oversimplify, Electron apps are basically just websites running in a dedicated browser. Slack works this way, as do a lot of applications at this point.

This is, admittedly, a niche application, but for me it scratches an itch. Keeping your hand on the keyboard is generally better ergonomically, and typically a lot faster, than reaching for the mouse. With Shortcat running I reach for the mouse a lot less, which I really enjoy.