MacOS – better way to search the menus

macosmenu barsoftware-recommendation

I have always used the help menu (command ⌘+shift ⇧+? /) to search the application menus for something that I don’t have a keyboard shortcut for (or don’t remember it).

A screenshot of a menu search using the Help menu

It’s an awesome feature, but it is annoying that it

  1. searches for other things too (help obviously).
  2. requires you to press the down arrow to select the first option.
  3. always shows up with the giant pointer thing pointing to the menu item.
  4. is sometimes slow as it looks for (online) help topics.

Is there an app that can do this better, or a defaults write to make the Help menu work the way I want it to?

Sidenote—it would be nice if I could exclude certain things like Safari history.

Best Answer

You can do this with Alfred Powerpack and Key Clue workflow. This way you can search the command in the Spotlight like behavior (while providing you with all the visible shortcuts). In fact, you can use Command+<Number Key> to quickly choose the command from search result.

Alfred Key Clue

I’ve actually written the similar post before, but using another workflow called Menu Bar Search, these days I use Key Clue as my primary workflow to search menu bar items.

P.S. Alfred has a built-in feature to search Safari bookmarks, but you can also develop the Key Clue workflow further to include Safari browsing history/bookmarks.

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