Keymap Makes Mac Shortcuts Easier to Find

For many Mac apps, the problem is not that shortcuts are absent. It is that they are hidden in menus, inconsistent between applications, or easy to forget when you are in the middle of work. Opening menus one by one is slow. Memorising everything is unrealistic. A shortcut manager can help, but only if it knows what the current app actually exposes.

Keymap is a macOS menubar app built around that narrower problem. Double-press the Command key and it opens a searchable panel for the application in use. The panel reads the app’s menu bar and lists the shortcuts attached to those commands. The developer says this works across apps such as Safari, VS Code and Figma, as well as Electron apps with standard native menus.

That makes Keymap less like a general keyboard remapping tool and more like an on-demand reference for the app in front of you.

A shortcut reference without manual cataloguing

The first useful distinction is between shortcuts that exist and shortcuts you can remember. Keymap is intended to deal with the second problem without asking you to build a catalogue by hand.

The proposed workflow is simple. Press Command twice, wait for the panel to appear, then search or browse the current app’s menu commands. The same panel can show conflicts and, where the relevant premium features are available, offer a way to change a shortcut. The developer also says Option or Control can be used for the summon gesture.

This is practical for software with deep menus. A developer working in an editor, a designer switching between tools, or anyone learning a new application can check the available commands without leaving the current window. It also avoids the common failure mode of keeping a shortcut list in a document that quickly becomes outdated.

Keymap requires Accessibility access to read menus and detect key presses. That is a meaningful setup requirement, even if the permission can be revoked later in System Settings. The app is also macOS-only, and the landing page lists macOS 14 Sonoma or later as the minimum requirement.

What it can inspect and change

Keymap’s conflict detection is based on shortcuts visible through application menus and on remapping rules created in Keymap. When it finds a collision, the developer says it assigns a severity and suggests a fix. This could help when several applications use the same combination differently, or when a personal remap creates an overlap.

The important qualification is that this is not a complete map of every shortcut active on a Mac. The product cannot inspect global hotkeys or input-method shortcuts because macOS does not expose a global shortcut registry. A shortcut belonging to another utility may therefore remain invisible to Keymap’s conflict checker.

There is a similar boundary around menus. Apps that use standard menus should be readable, including the Electron examples listed by the developer. Fully custom menus, including some games and Java applications, are not supported in the same way. A normal-looking menu bar is offered as a quick indication that an app should work.

The paid upgrade adds usage statistics and remapping. Usage statistics are described as showing which shortcuts you use and your conflict-free rate over time. Remapping can be applied globally or per app, with the example of changing Command-T to Shift-Command-T. The developer says loops and system-reserved combinations such as Command-Q are protected.

That feature set is more useful for people who have settled into a workflow and want to tune it. It is less compelling if you only need an occasional list of menu commands, since the free plan includes shortcut reference and conflict detection.

Local storage and the trade-offs

Keymap is presented as a local and private utility. The developer says it stores its data on the Mac, requires no account, and sends no telemetry. Those claims fit the product’s purpose: reading menus and tracking shortcut usage do not inherently require a cloud service. Still, users should understand that Accessibility access is powerful, so the permission deserves the same care as any other utility that can observe keyboard activity.

The pricing model is a free plan with a paid upgrade. The upgrade is a one-time purchase rather than a subscription, and the developer says it supports up to three personal Macs with lifetime updates. A refund period is also advertised. These are useful terms to check at the point of purchase, since licensing and platform support can change.

Who Keymap is for

Keymap is aimed at Mac users who work across shortcut-heavy applications and regularly pause to search menus or remember which application owns a particular key combination. Developers and designers are plausible users, but the basic panel should make sense to anyone learning unfamiliar software.

It is not a universal shortcut manager. It does not reveal global hotkeys or IME bindings, cannot fully inspect custom-drawn menus, and only runs on relatively recent versions of macOS. The Accessibility permission may also be too much for someone who wants a simple static reference sheet. For users who fit those constraints, Keymap addresses a specific annoyance with a small, direct workflow. For everyone else, its limits are central to the decision, not footnotes.