CREATE CUSTOM SHORTCUTS
Get instant access with HotKey
IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes
YOU WILL LEARN How to create your own keyboard shortcuts
YOU’LL NEED HotKey, Mac OS X 10.10 or later
One of our favourite kinds of app is the one that’s clearly a labour of love, and it often comes into being when a developer spots a feature Apple hasn’t provided and steps up to offer it. HotKey is a brilliant example of that. Peter Vorwieger has created a simple, free and really useful utility for macOS that enables you to quickly and easily create all kinds of keyboard shortcuts – not just for apps but for folders and the clipboard too. So if there’s a particular folder you’re always opening or an app you often need to call up, you can create a keyboard combination for it and access it instantly.
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In addition to your shortcuts, you can get HotKey to display an icon in the menu bar. This enables you to see all your shortcuts, which is handy if you’ve forgotten one of them, and it also enables you to see the contents of the clipboard in full screen. It’s a good place to park your most-used apps.
The most obvious use for HotKey is for apps: being able to call up, say, Logic Pro by pressing ç+L makes us smile every time. But you can also use it to open folders, and that’s by far our favourite thing about it. We have several folders that we’re accessing constantly, and before HotKey we put aliases to them all on our Mac desktop. Now we can get instant access to all of them while our desktop remains clear and clutter-free. Carrie Marshall