Hacker News Reader

Comment by taco_emoji | Hacker News Reader

This looks really cool but the Youtube video was very confusing. You were talking about a cell but I couldn't see WHERE the cell was. There needs to be a big arrow or obvious flashing circle or something. I still don't quite understand how this works.

View on HN

Agree. Apparently the grid is not made up of one letter squares and you have to figure out the row and column, it's made up of two letter rectangles.

What it looks like when you select that rectangle to give you more precision, I could not figure out from the video.

Two or three static images would be most helpful.

It looks to me that each cell is two letters [ A K ], so if one wishes to go to that cell, then CMD + A + K would put the mouse in the center of that cell. Letting go of CMD would close the overlay and the mouse is just there in that space, while pressing Space before letting go of CMD would cause a mouse click event. If one wishes for greater mouse precision, after typing CMD + A + K and holding CMD there, a smaller grid of letter squares are displayed within the original cell; typing the matching character in the sub-cell moves the mouse to that even more specific point.

Or it might not be holding CMD, I could be wrong. Here's a better and shorter video explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2rmvlOz5l0

Looks like the screen is divided into a 26x26 H-V grid represented by |[A-Z] [A-Z]|, and typing e.g. `[hotkey], d, e` will click (4, 5) from top left? The cursor seem to click the center of the grid. Presumably that happens to be precise enough on macOS.

It's difficult to see in the video, but I've downloaded it and tried it, and on a real screen, it's very obvious that the grid is made up of cells that contain two letters, like [MK].

I'm not sure if I had a use for this, but it was extremely easy to use. I'm already looking where I want to click anyway, so when I hit the Command key, two letters appear where I'm looking, I'm typing them and space, and I've clicked the area.

It's also unclear to me how you handle movements at a scale smaller than an individual cell, or if it's possible at all.

You can press any key on the keyboard afterwards for further precision. I think.

Yes. Once you hit "JM" for example, you see a subgrid with more letters (these are standardized for all the character pairs, so you only have to remember them once). You can just press space or hit one of the additional letters for additional precision.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com