14 DAY TRIAL // Programs we spend a lot of time in and working with become very familiar to us over time. As with anything new there is always a learning curve, at the end of which you have a workflow and a familiarity with the tool to get things done faster and better. The more complex the program, the greater the number of things you can do with it, and all those commands and options are usually placed in menus and submenus, which can often be intimidating, to say the least. Some programs make use of floating windows, palettes and toolbars to give you faster access to all the options, but most of them simply use menus. Depending on the type of work you are doing, moving to the menu can sometimes be less than productive, and for this reason, keyboard shortcuts are employed.
The issue when working in a new program is that most of the time you do not know all the keyboard shortcuts and this can turn into a problem if a program happens to share such a hotkey with another software product which you use extensively, but assigns a totally different function to that shortcut. This can, in the best case, cause mild frustration, in the worst case, irreparable loss of information and time.
To help smooth out the learning curve and make learning keyboard shortcuts easier, you can use KeyCue.
What is it? KeyCue is a little application that stays hidden and out of the way until you invoke it. When invoked, it will present a floating bevel which contains all the keyboard shortcuts available in the currently active application, along with their descriptions, ordered in the way the can be found within the menus themselves. You can look up the shortcut and execute it without having to mouse over to the menu, or submenu.
This helps you in learning the keyboard shortcuts you need and can even help you discover new shortcuts that were so deep buried in submenus that you never even knew existed.
Using it... After installing the program, while it is in the background, it will 'listen' for the Command key, and whenever the Command key is kept pressed for a set amount of time, the KeyCue window will appear listing all the keyboard shortcuts. This is a very smart implementation because it is so natural. When you want to use a keyboard shortcut that you can't remember, you start out by pressing the Command key anyway. The amount of time that the key needs to be kept down can be set to anything from a quarter of a second to two seconds, so it should easily accommodate your tastes.
The keyboard shortcuts and their descriptions are structured just like they would be if you were to navigate to the menus, with submenus being embedded in the main menu. Furthermore, KeyCue also lets you search for shortcuts, highlighting the ones that match and dimming the ones that don't. After using one of the commands, KeyCue will disappear until you invoke it again.
Most of this behavior can be fine-tuned to suit your preferences and needs.
Very serviceable... To me, personally, this program did not seem extremely useful, since the programs I use I know inside out after years of working with them, and the programs that go through my hand everyday I do not use long enough to actually need to learn the keyboard shortcuts. Or at least that's what I thought?perhaps the greatest thing this program does, is help you get in touch with the services menu.
The Services menu is a part of OS X that holds tremendous potential but rarely gets used. The way it lets you interact with information across programs is great, but the big issue with it is that it changes so much from one application to another, and that many applications add entries I never even knew were there. KeyCue gives you instant access to many Services Menu entries and helps you learn the shortcuts through working with them. This method of working with it is so much better than the tangled mass of menus and submenus and shortcuts from the black abyss that get assigned to those service menu items to avoid overlaps with other applications.
Just start entering a shortcut and KeyCue will help you fill the rest of it in? it's that easy.
The Good Intuitive and simple to use, a great way to learn keyboard shortcuts.
The Bad Huge applications that have hundreds of keyboard shortcuts can get out of hand. Perhaps a method through which the search capability actually only showed the results would be good. Then again, such programs are so few and far between, and their users have already customized them in every aspect that they have no need for an application such as this.
The Truth Great keyboard shortcut helper. Very well designed and very well implemented.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
