Show HN: Vimac – Productive macOS keyboard-driven navigation (opens in new tab)

Hey, it’s you! The author of Shortcat. I tried out your project maybe a year ago and absolutely loved the concept, but eventually had to give up on it when it kept crashing and didn’t reliably find what I was attempting to click on. I never knew if Shortcat was to blame or if it was the application not being properly presented to the Accessibility system.

Anyway, Shortcat is a freakin brilliant idea and I hope you keep working on it, or help this author with their project. If you think you’re going to have time to work on Shortcat again, though, I’d happily buy a copy (even if I already did before, I can’t remember if I did) and be an active bug reporter.

> it taking quite a lot of CPU

Yes that is fixed.

The reason for slow performance + high cpu usage on electron/webkit apps was just the sheer amount of mach ipc calls (from the many many <div> layers) needed to be made to fetch the entire UI element tree.

This has been fixed two days ago Heres the solution for those interested: https://github.com/dexterleng/vimac/pull/190

I was also using a bunch of async queues instead of just a single NSThread which likely contributed to high cpu usage, and that has also been fixed.

> warning that I am using a screen reader.

Nope, you should get this warning, although it was a one time prompt for me. This is because Accessibility is opt-in for electron apps for performance reasons, and I have to ask for it through setting the AXManualAccessibility attribute (see https://electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/accessibility#assistive...), which I guess triggers the prompt.

It actually technically could support Firefox/chrome, but I have disabled it because enabling accessibility on chrome breaks window managers.

Also vimium will always be faster than vimac due to how slow the accessibility API is.

I would recommend using both for now.

Nope. This is really just making your GUI work better with the keyboard. Editing text is fundamentally different than manipulating a graphical interface, so this doesn't mimic any vim functionality (with one exception: when this app is in scroll mode, you can use HJKL keys to scroll windows contents.)

It's very much like Vimium, which is nothing like Vim, so no. I see Vimium being referred to as "vim bindings" for chrome which I never got. Maybe someone could enlighten me on this.

You will be some part of the way to knowing navigation in vim.

Yes, you can do so!

make it optional =)

It took about a year without mouse use for my wrist to heal. Now I use a mouse but I'm very careful with posture and mouse positioning.

How long did it take to familiarize yourself with the trackball?

I didn't really try other pointing devices because I thought that they won't be as good as the mouse, plus I liked the idea of using keyboard-driven navigation software.

Wow so cool! Hope to give this a go sometime soon

And the Mac kill ring is separate from the clipboard so that means you can have two things copied at once and insert them with separate keybindings. Unfortunately the kill ring only contains a single element, so has no history.

some other useful ones are C-h/C-d (backwords/forwards delete), C-o (insert line), and the main Emacs movement keys C-n, C-p, C-b, C-f. Remapping Capslock to be a second Control makes using these regularly much more natural. Karabiner is a good app for easily remapping keys on macOS.

It's possible to customize these as well, see e.g. https://www.hcs.harvard.edu/%7Ejrus/Site/cocoa-text.html, http://www.deepsky.com/~misaka/MacOSX/DefaultKeyBinding.dict.

I've been searching for this for almost a year... https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/ers1b0/vimium_for...

I am a Mac user, but now that you've mentioned this, I'll upvote the parent on general principle. While I don't think Vimac is specifically for me, it's odd little system-level utilities like this that would make it really tough for me to switch to Windows -- or Linux -- if I couldn't find equivalents.