Appetizer Menus Minipost
Geek-o-meter: 1️⃣ 2 3
As a serious automator, your primary focus should be to use your mouse as little as possible. This is both because it is a potential source of tendonitis and because it can be the slowest and weakest link in the precision chain.
Big scores require big screens and dragging your mouse over long distances in the hope of landing at the correct spot can be cumbersome. That's why I want to highlight three small apps that make life a little easier. For this summer special, no coding or hacking is required. Just take your laptop to the beach, put on your favorite shades, and get rolling!
Bartender
$16 + local taxes.
Some may have heard of this app that cleans up the menu bar, as it seems like it has been around for ages. For a long time, the primary purpose of Bartender was simply to clean up the menu bar by selecting which icons you wanted to hide and arranging them to your liking. The smart thing is that you can choose which items you want to hide and only bring up when clicking on the menu bar, and you can choose which items you just don’t want to see at all.
As shown in my preferences, I only have some informational items shown, with many utility items hidden. I've spaced them out to visually organize them into groups, and I could also add several items to a single group; creating a dropdown menu containing my chosen items.
I actually don't use any of that functionality. In fact, I'm considering only keeping my TogglTracker in the menu bar. Bartender lets me perform searches similar to Spotlight or Alfred:
I've set this up with the shortcut Ctrl+Space, and I find it much easier to simply type 'dr(opbox)' or 'cl(eanMyMac)' to get to where I want to be. However, it often depends on me moving the mouse to the menu bar once it is triggered, which seems to rely on the item developers to implement.
Now, I choose to install all menu items since it is only a simple (and smart) search away.
With the recent Bartender 5 update, they've implemented a lot of styling options for rounded corners and a floating menu bar. It can even divide into two sections suitable for the camera notch on laptops. Version 5 also introduced presets of menus. If you use your computer in different contexts, you can set up your menu bar with the relevant items and—with the new triggers function—switch between the presets based on what apps are running, the time of day, your location, or WiFi.
Again, I don’t use these features. I keep my menu bar nice and tidy and just search, in line with my keypad serenity; I enjoy menu bar serenity.
Menuwhere
$3 + local taxes.
ManyTricks is a company that makes several great helper apps. Menuwhere is a simple tool that places the menu of your frontmost application under your cursor.
Well, don’t I need to use the mouse then? No! Simply arrow your way around the menus or use the hotkey method of navigating with the capital letters of each branch in the hierarchy.
As you can see in the screenshot, Sibelius has not been populated by many useful menu items since that "whole thing with Avid",[^1] and what we find here are shortcuts that we all should be familiar with.
However, with another shortcut, we can have it show the menus of all open applications:
I like to use it to import audio to Nuendo if I’m in the middle of a score. On some projects, I have information about keyswitches, preferences for recording, or composer sketches as PDFs. I open and close them like it’s no one's business. However, I can find myself needing certain documents I thought I didn’t need anymore. Opening the global menu and going to the 'Recent Documents' of Preview is much quicker than navigating Finder.
A smart feature is that you can select to always have it show the alternate menu items that require you to hold down the Option key. So it shows both 'Empty Trash' and 'Secure Empty Trash', and you don’t have to worry about any hidden crypts.
As you can see, mine is also set up to be somewhat gigantic. You can set the size pretty liberally. I’ve found this to work for me since I don’t want to hunt for the mouse on my two monitors, and I can easily see the shortcuts.
As they say on their website:
— “That’s really it. Menus under the mouse via a modifier-plus-right-mouse-click and/or a user-defined hotkey. That’s what it does, and it does it well.”
I forgot that I only paid $3, and I can’t believe the relief it has provided me.
Paletro
$7.
"If you're a fan of Alfred (the superior search and app launcher), you likely appreciated learning about Bartender's function to act similarly for the menu bar. Paletro combines these features with MenuWhere.
It brings up the menu for the active application in an Alfred–style search dialog. This means, akin to MenuWhere, you can access all the functions of your active app using keystrokes, and it features a smart search that learns your preferences.
Switching between a handful of different DAWs, I often find myself searching for functions I only need occasionally, and this is where Paletro has saved my bacon.[^2]
It's both similar to MenuWhere and yet quite different. I utilize MenuWhere when I know the specific menu location I need to access but want to avoid tendonitis, and I turn to it when I need to call functions in apps that aren't active. On the other hand, I use Paletro when I'm uncertain about where to find a function within the active app.
Menu Wrap
These apps aren't expensive, yet they can significantly enhance ease-of-use. If you haven't already, click the Alfred link to explore it. As I mentioned, it's the superior macOS search application and app launcher, even in its free version. The Powerpack provides numerous excellent workflows that I'll delve into in a later post about the magic of app launchers!
For now, take a look at what's on the menu and choose any of the options that catch your eye.
Footnotes
[^1]: That shall not be mentioned.
[^2]: Literally, once I barely finished exporting audio to the movie only to find my bacon in the oven had reached the perfect amount of crispiness. If I had been searching in the menus, I wouldn't have made it out of the studio in time to take the bacon out, and it would have ended with a smoke-filled kitchen.