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I Wish We Had Tear-Off Hotbars


One of the major reasons I avoid screenshots/videos in my posts generally is because of how cumbersome it is to take them. And I wish I could kinda "tear off" commands from different apps and place it onto a temporary menu bar.

For example, when I was writing this post All The Menu Bar Weather Apps for MacOS — I really wanted to convert all screenshots to text. Why, you might ask? Because the workflow requires so many clicks in order.

So, I usually have my clop optimize on clipboard on. But given this required stitching of different images — I didn’t want to optimize each image and have it progressively get worse. So, this is what it looked like —

Pause auto-optimizations in Clop, then show desktop in Supercharge. Use Shottr to capture any window (note that this doesn't create a file). Copy the image in Shottr, then capture additional windows (like settings or preferences). Open clipboard history in Raycast (which doesn’t have a paste stack) multiple times to Paste all images into the last Shottr image, turn optimization back on in Clop, and copy the final image from Shottr.

Oh, now I want to generate image captions, here is what that looked like —

First, paste the image into Notion, then open ChatGPT and paste the image into ChatGPT to generate a caption. Copy the generated caption into Notion, replace line breaks using Shift+Enter, and finally cut and paste the text into the image caption field that is opened by a click on the caption button.

I wish there was a way to create a workflow hotbar on the go, one where I could put all the actions I need to take across various apps into one place, and then discard the hotbar. Sure, I can assign keyboard shortcuts to all these actions — but I possibly never need to use these actions again, and if I need to, I am not going to remember the shortcuts I assigned to them. I don’t even know if tear-off hotbars are possible in MacOS, but I wish they were.