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Show HN: Show the current application's shortcuts on Windows, Linux and macOS (tkainrad.dev)
6 points by tkainrad on Dec 12, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments


Looking up keyboard shortcuts on the web takes you out of the current context and breaks your workflow. That’s why, as a Linux user, I have always been a bit envious of macOS users, who had access to tools that could instantly show the current application’s shortcuts.

On Windows and Linux, there was no such thing. You had to find shortcut information in the software’s documentation and hope that it was searchable.

KeyCombiner Desktop shows the current application’s shortcuts in a searchable table, triggered instantly via a system-wide key combination. It is available for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

This lookup also includes all shortcuts and text snippets from personal KeyCombiner collections, making it a universal cheatsheet. I am afraid you will have to read the blog post to fully understand what this means.

I appreciate any feedback!


does it support custom shortcuts?


Yes and no.

It shows the default bindings of the active application's shortcuts. However, with KeyCombiner you can also create personal collections of shortcuts and commands. Those are always shown. In these personal collections, you can set whatever bindings and customizations you like. You can quickly build these collections by importing selected(or all) shortcuts from the public collection of an application.

In practice, when I use the lookup and search for a shortcut that I have customized, I will see both the default binding (because it's shown for the active application), and my own binding (because it's in my personal collections).

Sorry if this was confusing. The blog post explains it in more detail and illustrates with animations.


that's what I thought. I think it would better work with a system of extendable config parsers to always show relevant nondefault shortcuts


If there was a way to get a user's custom keybindings on all operating systems for a large majority of applications, I would surely do it. Writing configuration parser's for each application+OS pair is not feasible, and would not work for all applications.

However, I think, in practice, you will find that the custom collections are a nice solution to this problem. I use a lot of custom bindings myself. Having the lookup show both my custom binding and the default binding is actually very nice to understand your custom bindings and find combinations where you might be better of with the default.




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