Matthew Palmer, a Mac and iOS developer, writes about Mac utilities, keyboard remapping, and Apple, and publishes small apps.
HN commenters mention his free Mac apps Vanilla for hiding menu bar icons and Horo for timers, and his emoji picker post.
That's actually the one I was thinking of as being awkward to activate :) I love the picker itself but the activation method is pretty clunky in my opinion.
I wish I could just hit one key instead of having to simultaneously press three. I've been using Rocket for awhile now (https://matthewpalmer.net/rocket/) which kind of takes the Slack style ":emoji_name" format to the whole computer, but it's still kind of awkward to activate and has a lot of false positive triggers. (It really makes you realize how often you type colons in everyday computer usage.)
Rocket ($10) [0] is my current favorite emoji picker though sometimes it does drive me crazy (css properties in chrome dev tools and the like, I understand it's impossible to avoid, it still drives me crazy). Also there are emojis with spaces in the name but the picker just closes if you type a space so you have to add aliases to make them searchable. But overall it's a great tool and you can also use it to insert gifs which is cool.
[0] https://matthewpalmer.net/rocket/
This is cool and potentially useful. I can imagine turning caps lock into Compose.
I will note two alternatives, depending on what you're trying to do:
* System Preferences > Keyboard > Text lets you specify replacements. For example, if I type ! ? (without the space) I get ‽, because who doesn't want an interrobang?
* https://matthewpalmer.net/rocket/ Rocket lets you add emoji anywhere using a syntax like Slack's
Well there are use cases where this is appropriate, the common multi-pod design patterns -> https://matthewpalmer.net/kubernetes-app-developer/articles/multi-container-pod-design-patterns.html
Generally I don’t see them and where they might be useful, I end up using a K8S Cronjob instead.
But why? I want each pod to have its own liveness probe and be able to scale independently.
Fwiw there are some apps to hide menu bar icons:
- Open source https://github.com/Mortennn/Dozer
- Freemium https://matthewpalmer.net/vanilla/
- $15 https://www.macbartender.com/
This looks like a light version of the Vanilla app [1] but free and open source.
Also, a clever solution to hide the unused icons!
[1]https://matthewpalmer.net/vanilla/