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).
It’s an awesome feature, but it is annoying that it
- searches for other things too (help obviously).
- requires you to press the down arrow to select the first option.
- always shows up with the giant pointer thing pointing to the menu item.
- 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.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.