If you’re a keyboard-oriented Mac user, Moom 4 speaks your language. Every custom action can have its own keyboard shortcut, for starters. And, of course, there’s Keyboard mode, with even more keyboard-centric powers.

Keyboard access to all custom actions

One of the new keyboard-focused features in Moom 4 is hiding at the bottom of the Keyboard section of Moom’s Settings window: The “Access custom actions via hot key” keyboard shortcut box.

This feature isn’t enabled by default (and it’s independent of Moom’s Keyboard mode), but in the above screenshot, it has been assigned a Shift-Control-Option-M shortcut.

Press the assigned shortcut keys, and Moom will pop up a window showing all of your custom actions, organized just as they appear in Moom’s Settings window:

The up and down arrow keys navigate the list vertically, and the left and right arrow keys drill down into and out of folders within the list; press Return to activate the selected item.

The screenshot also subtly shows another ability of this menu: Type-selection of entries in the list. Start typing, and Moom will smart-match your typing to the entries in the list, highlighting matches with underlines. The screenshot shows a selection based on typing stoti to select the Stock Ticker saved layout. (Press Return when the action you want to use is highlighted.)

Keyboard access to some custom actions

Want to use this same technique to access specific custom actions? Put those actions into a folder, and give that folder a keyboard shortcut.

And you don’t have to restrict yourself to one folder. Create a folder for layouts, another for grids, a third for Move & Resize actions, etc. Once you give them a keyboard shortcut, you can access them via the pop-up menu seen above.

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You can also access saved layouts via third-party apps Alfred and Keyboard Maestro (and probably other similar apps), both of which add the ability to actively filter the list of matching layouts as you type.

Access Moom layouts via Alfred

If you’re an Alfred user with the Powerpack, you can use this workflow to browse and select from Moom’s saved layouts:

Note that we haven’t tested this workflow ourselves, but have heard from others on Discord that it works.

Access Moom layouts via Keyboard Maestro

If you’re a Keyboard Maestro user, you can use a simple macro to browse your collection of layouts, then use type-select to narrow the matches as you type:

To use this macro, download it from our site (20 KB), then expand the archive. Double-click the expanded file and it should open in Keyboard Maestro, in the Global Macro Group. Macros always import disabled, so right click on the macro and select Enable Macro.

The default keyboard shortcut is Control-Option-Y, but can be easily changed to anything you like.

Access Moom layouts via Shortcuts

It’s also possible to access Moom’s layouts using macOS’ Shortcuts app, but honestly, about the only advantage of doing this is that the list is flattened, unlike the “all actions” list in Moom. But you can’t use type-select, and the list is a bit slow to appear.

Nonetheless, here’s the shortcut in case you’d like to use it: Moom layouts

There may be some additional optimization possible, too–this was my first try at it, and once I saw there wasn’t any sort of type-select, I mostly stopped working on it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 29th, 2024 at 2:07 pm by Rob Griffiths, and is filed under How To, Moom, Products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.