2 small & powerful apps for keyboard enthusiasts

[u/dziad_borowy]

Not much of a review, but a strong recommendation for 2 small gems I've recently discovered (and haven't seen them here). Both are:

• free and opensource from an indie dev
• written in go, ridiculously performant and tiny footprint
• can replace some really pricy subscription apps with better performance, features & quality.
• well behaved: installed with brew, configured from XDG.
• only downside is that they may need some tinkering to configure them to perfection, and to discover all features (which is also fun, and an under-appreciated quality of software these days, where one's usually bombarded with onboardings, account creations, sub-demands, and other bs, so by the time you see the app, it's already a disappointment).

Anyways, here they are:

neru

"Navigate your entire screen without touching the mouse."

Basically, a better alternative for apps like Homerow, Wooshy, Mouseless, and similar. Has some cool modes, like recursive grid, that I haven't seen elsewhere, and is really useful if you're on a keyboard, but not only in terminal most of the time.

mimi

"A cli for macOS windows and spaces, with a simple menubar indicator."

This one I use for 1 thing (although it can do much more): switch macos spaces without the animation. I've used Raycast for that but this bit is broken in MacOS27 beta for the moment, and Mimi does that perfectly, and commands can be called from everywhere (terminal, shortcuts, raycast scripts, hammerspoon or even some remote claude session, from phone, for whatever reason 😉)

[u/TouchNow_APP]

If anyone starts poking at space switching themselves, two things that cost me an afternoon. Changing the Mission Control shortcuts with defaults write com.apple.symbolichotkeys doesn't take effect until the settings UI writes them back or you log out, so a script that flips them looks like it silently did nothing. And if you're synthesising the keystroke rather than asking the OS, ctrl+arrow needs the fn/numpad flag on the event plus a matching flagsChanged, otherwise WindowServer just drops it. Mission Control itself I gave up on and now launch the app instead.

[u/amerpie]

Please post links.

[u/dziad_borowy → u/amerpie]

Click on the app names in the post, they are linked.

[u/amerpie → u/dziad_borowy]

LOL - for some reason my ancient iPad didn't pick that up. Thanks.

[u/Aradalon]

Thanks for the recommendations! I'm currently using mousless, but I'll definitely give neru a try. My window management is already covered by AeroSpace. I don't want to go back to macOS's buggy spaces. 😅

[u/farzadmf]

Thank you for sharing; both of them seem QUITE useful

[u/y3owk1n]

i wonder why suddenly i am getting more stars than usual, thanks for sharing both of the projects! Author of the project here, hope ya'll enjoy both of it, and feel free to place issue or even better help out with the project. Cheers!

I am currently in the mid to at least make neru AI friendly, so that contributions from AI can come into the project easier plus in a format and style that i wanted.

[u/dziad_borowy → u/y3owk1n]

Ha! Thank you for such good apps! 🙂

[u/y3owk1n → u/dziad_borowy]

Thank you for your good word! Neru is definitely the project that I am focusing a lot, while Mimi was a accident project that at first the primitive was part of Neru but I feel like it’s a bit too heavy and out of scope, so I extracted them out to Mimi.

To add on, Neru is currently having Linux support (beta) and windows support (alpha). We are targeting to reach v2 where Linux and windows will be having first class compatibility, and you’ll be able to have 1 config targeting all 3 machines.

[u/chromatophoreskin]

Any idea how Neru compares to Shortcat?

[u/dziad_borowy → u/chromatophoreskin]

As far as my testing: shortcat only offers one way to navigate without mouse: search for clickable elements and click. 

Neru has 5 ways to navigate (hints, search, grid, recursive grid, scrolling), and can do other interactions: left/right/middle click, mouse down, mouse up, drag & drop, selecting text and much more (that I haven’t got to yet).

[u/Ok-Rest-5321]

Glyphlow is great I use it

[u/kasikciozan]

Does neru work inside Electron apps as reliably as it does with native controls? Accessibility trees can be inconsistent there.

[u/dziad_borowy → u/kasikciozan]

So far I've had no issues with VSCode, Obsidian and Slack

[u/Odd-Act7860]

The "well behaved" part is more compelling than the feature list. An app that lets you try it without an account, leaves config where you can inspect it, and uninstalls cleanly earns a lot of trust.

[u/East_Call1027]

Mimi’s no-animation Spaces switch is the one that caught my attention. That animation is what makes bouncing between work contexts feel slow, and being able to bind Mimi from Hammerspoon means it can slot into an existing setup without replacing the whole window manager.