Getting started
What Tinycast is, and the few minutes that set it up.
Tinycast is a native macOS launcher that lives in the menu bar. Press a shortcut, a palette floats in over whatever you were doing, you type, and it gets out of the way.
It is around 5 MB on disk and stays under 100 MB of memory, because it is SwiftUI and AppKit with zero third-party dependencies. There is no Electron, no account, no sign-in and no telemetry.
Set it up
Tinycast walks you through this the first time it launches, but here it is in full.
1. Record a shortcut
Tinycast ships with no shortcut bound. Nothing happens until you pick one, which is deliberate — a launcher that claims a chord you were already using is a bad neighbour.
Open Settings → General → Global Shortcuts and click the App Launcher field, then press the combination you want. ⌥Space is a common choice, but it is yours to pick.
You can also bind a double-tapped lone modifier — press and release ⌘ twice quickly, with no other key. See Hotkeys for the exact timings.
2. Grant Accessibility, when you need it
Accessibility is the only permission Tinycast ever asks for, and only when you first use something that needs it — pasting a clip back into another app, expanding a snippet, moving a window.
The launcher itself needs nothing. See Permissions.
3. Turn on what you want
Seven features ship off and stay completely inert until you enable them:
| Feature | Where |
|---|---|
| File Search | Settings → File Search |
| Notes | Settings → Notes |
| Snippets | Settings → Snippets |
| Window Management | Settings → Window Management |
| Quicklinks | Settings → Quicklinks |
| Custom commands | Settings → Commands |
| Extensions | Settings → Extensions |
Off means off: nothing is scanned, nothing is indexed, and no memory is held. This is why the app stays small even though the feature list is long.
The first thing to learn
Everything happens in one window. Type to search, ↵ to act, ⌘K to see every other action for whatever is selected, ⎋ to leave.
That last one matters more than it sounds — ⌘K is how you discover the app. Every screen's full action list lives there, with the shortcut for each one printed beside it.
Next: the palette, or install it if you haven't yet.