Blog
Why I built Super Shortcuts
By Mike Le
On my first day as an investment banking analyst, someone walked over to my desk and took my mouse.
It wasn’t a hazing ritual. It was policy. New analysts don’t get a mouse, because the people training you have figured out something most people never do: in a job measured in hundred-hour weeks, the single highest-leverage skill you can build in your first week is driving your computer entirely from the keyboard.
The mouse is the slowest tool on your desk
Banking runs on Excel, and Excel rewards the keyboard like almost nothing else. A model that takes a keyboard-fluent analyst ten minutes takes a mouse-dependent one twenty. Every reach for the mouse, every hunt for the cursor, every click into a menu and then a submenu is a tiny tax, and you pay it thousands of times a day.
Take the mouse away and you have no choice but to learn the shortcuts. Within a few weeks your hands just know them, and you are roughly 50% faster at the thing you do all day long.
Sit with that number for a second. Half the early leverage of a new hire comes not from being smarter, or working more hours, but from not touching the mouse. It is the cheapest, fastest performance upgrade an employer can hand someone - so they make it mandatory on day one.
The lesson stuck. The method didn’t scale.
That experience permanently changed how I think about working on a computer. Keyboard fluency isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a genuine superpower, and the gap between people who have it and people who don’t is enormous.
But the way I got there - brute-force memorizing one app’s hundreds of shortcuts, under pressure, because someone confiscated my pointing device - is a terrible way to learn it. And it doesn’t transfer. Learn Excel cold and you’ve learned Excel, not your computer. Every other app speaks its own arbitrary shortcut language, chosen by someone else to fit a menu rather than your memory. The good keys are taken, your custom ones collide, and you forget the rest.
For years I kept wishing the rest of my Mac worked the way Excel did the day they took my mouse: fast, fluid, everything one keystroke away. Outside that one app, it never did.
So I built the thing I wanted
Super Shortcuts is the answer to a simple question: what if every app worked the way Excel did when they took my mouse away - but without years of memorizing someone else’s keys?
It gives you one key - a hyper key on Caps Lock - and turns it into a command layer that is actually yours:
- Collision-free. The hyper key fires a modifier combo almost no app uses, so your shortcuts never clash with anything.
- Scoped to context. The same chord does the right thing in each app, so you remember one mapping, not one per app.
- Backed by a cheat sheet. Hold the key and a cheat sheet drops over your keyboard showing exactly what’s bound right now. You never have to memorize under pressure - the thing that made my first month so brutal.
- Yours, and private. It runs locally on your Mac, offline, no account. You can even fire commands by voice, transcribed on-device.
You shouldn’t need someone to walk over and confiscate your mouse to get the advantage I got. You should be able to build your own command layer, on keys that make sense to you, with a cheat sheet that carries you until your hands take over.
The mouse on your desk is still the slowest tool you own. Super Shortcuts is for everyone who never had someone come along and take it away.
Download Super Shortcuts - it’s free to try - and if you’re new to the idea, start with the Mac hyper key or read what we actually shipped.