The palette

Everything Tinycast does happens in one floating panel. Each feature is either the root launcher screen or a screen you reach from it, and every screen backs out to the launcher.

Moving around

⌘K is how you learn the app. Every screen lists its full action set there, with each action's shortcut printed beside it. The full table is in Keyboard shortcuts.

Emacs chords

If you have the muscle memory, these work anywhere in the palette:

On the emoji grid all four move the selection. Everywhere else the horizontal pair falls through to the text caret, because moving a caret is what you usually mean there. A chord with any extra modifier — ⌃⇧Q, say — is left alone.

Tab is narrower than it looks

⇥ cycles the launcher and clipboard, and nothing else. Calculator History, Search Quicklinks and Uninstall stay out of the cycle deliberately — they are destinations you chose, not places to land in by accident.

The exception: when the selected row declares arguments — a quicklink or an extension command that takes input — ⇥ walks those fields first.

Where it opens

Settings → General → Appearance holds both placement settings.

Follow the cursor across displays (on by default) opens the palette on whichever display the pointer is on. Turn it off to always use the display with the menu bar.

Drag to reposition (off by default) lets you move the panel. Grab the thin strip just above the search field, the header margins, or the search field past the end of its text — clicking on the text still edits it, the way Spotlight behaves.

While you drag, dotted guides mark the default position and light up when you are close enough to snap. Release there and it snaps home and forgets any remembered position; release elsewhere and that position persists across restarts.

A remembered position outranks the display setting. It is dropped only when no connected display can show the palette any more — you unplugged a monitor, or changed resolution. It is deliberately left out of settings backups, since window geometry does not travel between machines.

Input source

Settings → General → Auto-switch input source picks a keyboard source to apply while the palette is open.

If you type Japanese or Chinese most of the day but your app names are Latin, this saves a switch every single time you open the launcher. Tinycast captures the source when the palette opens, applies your choice, and restores the original on hide — but only if the palette is still on the source it applied, so a switch you made yourself while it was open is respected.

Appearance

Settings → General → Appearance → Theme offers System, Light and Dark.

System follows macOS live. Light is the same design with the ink inverted — nothing about the layout, type, motion or behaviour changes between them.

The Toggle System Appearance action changes macOS itself. Tinycast follows that only while its own theme is set to System.

Compact mode

Settings → General → Appearance → Compact mode opens the launcher as a slim search bar that expands into the full list as you type. ↓ expands it and selects the first row.

With Show favorites in compact mode on, your favorite app icons sit at the right of the bar and ⌘1 through ⌘5 launch them; a … button appears past five to expand into the rest. The same numbers work in the expanded list. See Favorites.

Pop to root

Settings → General → Pop to Root Search decides how long after the window closes Tinycast resets to the launcher: Immediately (default), or after 5, 15, 30, 60 or 90 seconds.

Raise it if you often dismiss the palette and come straight back to the same screen.