rxhanson

You can also set a keyboard shortcut to activate it as a toggle.

Good to know, that's what I was expecting. I'll have to give the Cat a spin! Also, thanks for this article and the Jef Raskin one - I thoroughly enjoyed them and their depth. I was in the middle of reading the book version of folklore.org (Revolution in the Valley) and these were a pleasant surprise.

Up and down arrow keys will cycle matches.

At the moment the Accessibility API results are limited to the frontmost window; it's on my todo list to expand this to additional windows and displays. Also, the green line will only be drawn on results on the main display - another item I plan on fixing.

Not that I'm aware of, but I do have plans to at least bring some version of this to Windows at some point.

Without knowing about Jef Raskin's ideas, I implemented something really similar to one of them in one of my Mac apps, Superkey. This idea in the Canon Cat was that you hold down a key and type text that you want to select anywhere in a document, then let go to select it - typically faster than reaching for a mouse or hitting arrow keys. In the Canon Cat it was an additional key (the leap key), below the space bar.

For the implementation in Superkey, you can select a key to use for this, like caps lock. The way I use it is I hold the caps lock key and type text, then the app uses OCR and optionally the macOS Accessibility API to search for matching text. Releasing the key or hitting enter will click (or double or triple click, etc) on a match.

Raskin's idea was of course more text-editing focused, and tapping on the leap keys will also move the cursor. I typically use Superkey to navigate UIs quickly, kind of as though UIs all have keyboard shortcut navigation. There are also limitations that Superkey faces, like not having access to offscreen parts of a document.

Good to know! I'm surprised that Magnet has any improvement over Rectangle in these areas, since Rectangle isn't really adding any overhead to the Accessibility API commands, but I'll have to investigate.

Thanks for the feedback! I agree and have had some ideas for improving this - one of them being copy/paste and drag behavior where you could copy a selection in Rectangle Pro and paste it as prettified JSON in an editor, and vice-versa. The dot file idea is also one that I like - it's just a surprisingly large effort to "do it right". Making UI's for representing this complexity is kind of tricky, and what's there now is actually my first cut - something that I figured I would iterate on but haven't gotten the time together to do it.

If you don't mind me asking, what are the warts? I'm always interested in improving the app.

Rectangle is a drop-in replacement for Spectacle, and provides an option upon first install to select the Spectacle default keyboard shortcuts. Note that Spectacle only included keyboard shortcut window management, while Rectangle also includes the drag to screen edge snapping.