Menuwhere 2.1 is out with one great improvement and one new feature. First, the great improvement: Responsiveness when using the keyboard is now much better. Much much better—even in apps like Safari that were slow before, you should see very rapid responses to your typing.

The new feature is somewhat esoteric, but it should make some menus in certain apps work in Menuwhere. More specifically, menus whose menu items rely on selected text. Here’s how we explained it in Menuwhere’s help:

The Advanced tab of Menuwhere’s preference has a new “Preload menus” box that needs a bit of an explanation. You should only have to use this box if both of the following conditions are true:

1. You use an app that contains a menu whose functionality is dependent on selected text—the Text menu in BBEdit, as listed in that box, is one such menu.
2. Those menus are not working by default in Menuwhere.

If both of those conditions are true, you can add the app and the menu name to this box, as shown by the two apps we’ve already listed—just add a comma and then the name of the app (as seen when you hover over its Dock icon), the greater-than symbol, and the name of the menu.

With that entry in place, those menus should now work from Menuwhere. If you run into any that don’t, please let us know.

As always, you can update in-app, or by downloading a fresh copy of the app from the Menuwhere page.

Yes, 2.0. Yes, 1.0 was yesterday. But yesterday, we had basically one main feature (menus under the mouse!). Today, we have two new major features, and one new minor feature, so we think the 2.0 is merited—and don’t worry, this is not a paid upgrade!

So what’s new? The first big new feature is an “all apps” menu option: Define a separate hot key, and Menuwhere will show you all the menus from all your apps:

Tip: If you activate the top-level entry (the app name), then Menuwhere will switch to that app.

The second major new feature is that you can now customize the size of the text in the menus, from 10 to 30 points—check out the Menuwhere web page if you’d like to see a comparison image. If you find the default menu size too small or too big, you’ll love this feature.

The small new feature is that in macOS Big Sur, you can set Menuwhere to Dark or Light mode independent of the setting of your system’s appearance. There are some other minor bug fixes, too, which you can read about in the release notes.

Thanks everyone for the great feedback on the app; we’ve got a nice list of stuff to work on for future releases—and no, 3.0 is not coming out tomorrow.

Say hello to Menuwhere, Many Tricks’ newest app. This handy $3 utility puts the frontmost app’s menu bar into a pop-up menu at your mouse’s location—say goodbye to those long trips to the menu bar; the main menu is now just a hot key away:

Once onscreen, you can navigate the menus by typing letters in the names of the menu items you wish to access (then pressing Enter), or by using the arrow keys and Enter, or even via the mouse.

If you’re a long-time Mac user, you’re probably aware of similar apps from the past…which is why we wrote Menuwhere, because those apps are all in the past. Menuwhere is here now, fully supported, 64-bit and Universal—it runs natively on Apple Silicon and Intel.

As this is a Many Tricks app, though, we didn’t stop at just displaying the menu under the mouse cursor.

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