Show HN: Pie Menu – a radial menu for macOS

That's nice!

I wrote a Swift package that does a similar thing (but as an iOS widget): https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner

My own experience, is that I keep on not using it in my projects. It's too much of an "in your face" widget. I was going to do a SwiftUI version of it, but stopped working on it, when I figured out that I probably wouldn't use it.

I suspect that MacOS, with the cursor-oriented navigation, is a better home for it.

Nice work – radial menus are so underrated.

A feature request is to allow the menu to ride along the cursor trajectory, effectively evolving the menu into a gesture GUI. I made an attempt at an svg implementation eight years ago: https://rawgit.com/lgrkvst/d3-sunburst-menu/master/demo/d3-s...

Always liked the Secret of Mana circular menu, but could never find a really good way of porting that to a computer.

Hi, I had some initial trouble where I kept selecting all the text on the website when I shift-z-clicked. This is easily fixed by making text unselectable on your site via CSS. I wouldn't recommend everyone use it for their entire site, but I think in your case it will make a better demo.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/826782/how-to-disable-te...

Happy to see someone implementing something along the lines of what I wrote an essay on years back - https://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=1086454

Don't quite understand why not more mobile apps have a radial menu.

Seems like a reasonable choice for one-thumb controls.

Did you know that Hackernews' own DonHopkins implemented pie menus for his X11 port of SimCity?

I liked the preview feature on the website, but shift + z is a horrible shortcut on a German keyboard. Just thought I'd let you know.

This is one of those things that is interesting but I don't immediately dis-like it like so many other ideas looking for a problem to solve. Being that it is so new, the one thing that strikes me immediately is the use of icons instead of text. I get that it looks good design-wise, but now my mind has to remember the icons. Some of the actions are short words where text could be used and not be cluttered: Move, Copy, Scale, etc. Maybe as an option?

Also, would it be possible to have a different trigger than keyboard keys? If I'm hitting keyboard modifier to enable this, I'll just hit the shortcut keys directly. What about middle-click (3-finger click on macOS multi-touch or something) equivalent to enable so that it is entirely mouse driven?

I've made one these for the web a few years ago

https://github.com/victorqribeiro/radialMenu

I was going to rewrite it using it SVG instead of canvas but never came around to it

Interesting app. Going to give it a spin. I like the 10 use model demo. FYI, for a moment, I thought it was a sub only app and was upset. Glad you have a fixed price option. Is lifetime in air quotes or will it really be lifetime?

I used to use a similar app where you'd spin your mouse in a circle and it'd pop open a radial menu in the center of the circle you drew.

It was kinda neat, I forget the name of it.

So for Adobe apps, for which this would be very useful, they install by default as Adobe <appname> <year>, i.e. "Adobe Photoshop 2023". I have several revisions installed for most of them for various reasons. When I attempt to add a shortcut from pie-menu.com, it tells me "Application adobe photoshop is not installed on your computer" :(

Nice idea! On German keyboards, Z and Y are swapped, so holding SHIFT-Z is not very convenient. You may want to allow both for your demo.

Reminds me a bit of the Surface Dial. Really liked that concept even if I’d never have the sort of setup that would benefit from it.

I thought "pie menu" was the generic term, going back a few decades. Not a brand name implementation of a generic term "radial menu" like the headline suggests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu

I've been using radial menu from Charmstone to switch apps on macos for about half a year and it's a really great paradign. Never could memorize too many shortcuts for switching apps but this is just as fast. I wish there was a high quality app for windows that did this.

Hey Marius, cool project! Would this work with just the middle mouse button click too?

Similar to https://charmstone.app/ but I really enjoy your "contextual" config. I wish it was dynamic somehow, though..

Another alternative is the "Search Menu Items" command from raycast: https://www.raycast.com/changelog/1-20-0

Have you considered displaying the text representation of the currently-hovered menu item inside the center of the circle? Or if the text wouldn't fit, then above/below the circle?

I really like the idea, but as a left handed person I found it needed to have a keyboard shortcut accessible from the right hand (maybe this can be an option in the menu?)

A bug report: the demo on the website doesn't work when you have a non-Latin (e.g. Cyrillic) keyboard layout active.

Are there plans to make Pie Menu available on Homebrew? I don't install anything from the App Store on mac.

What’s the free tier like? I see no explanation of that but it’s free with in-app “unlimited access” purchases.

This is so creative and super useful!

Where this is most helpful is: Vision Pro.

After all, this UI and "gesture" is how you calibrate it ...

Love it! installed thru SetApp :)

Lovely website and what looks like a lovely app. Will download and give it a try!

The demo on the website is very cute and a bit unexpected.

Add DualShock/DualSense bindings and I'm sold.

I can't try this because my OS version is too old. I'm confident the app marketing, specifically the idea "Your favorite shortcuts at your mousetip!," is appropriate for how most would use it, though my case would be different.

My first thought was how this would be helpful for the app commands I use just enough to want quickly accessible but not often enough that I remember the keyboard shortcuts. I'll give this a try when my Mac/OS are compatible. Best of luck.

Nice job on the website! That’s sick!

This just makes sense

See also: Opie addon in World of Warcraft.

Does not feel intuitive with mouse (too slow) but keybinds / touch, sure.

Uhm, isn't this what command (right) click is supposed to do?

A cross-platform pie menu: https://github.com/kando-menu/kando

I haven't used it, but the readme seems very nice. It might be more focused on app launching.

One of the best things I've ever used in a program is Autodesk Maya's Hotbox. I even went so far as designing a Flash website where the user interface was a riff on that. I'm going to have to check this out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q06HN5dXzI

Personally I‘m using BetterTouchTool‘s floating menus for this. These are very powerful because they are fully scriptable and can be triggered in many different ways (although the docs are still very basic, most useful info is on their community forum). Here is a nice window management preset I have been using for some time now: https://community.folivora.ai/t/mouse-window-menu-mwm-window...

It looks cool, this is not a critique of your work just something I have noticed about myself and curious if others have.

I don't know why but I have long struggled with using icons to mark a task. There are certain ones that are so engrained like a floppy disk to save, a plus mark for a new tab, reload symbol, home symbol, or other very obvious ones. Or ones that are just the logo for a brand, those are easy to remember.

But especially as we moved away from skeuomorphism (which thankfully bits and pieces of it are combing back, without it being bashed over the head with, like with the apple pencil UI) this got a lot harder for me.

And I see this, and and I just know that I am going to have to look at all 6 going in a circle to find the one I want every time.

I experienced this recently where I wanted to put a Shortcut (from the Mac App) on my toolbar in finder. My only option is to show icon only, text only, or both. I can't say, I want to have both for some things.

I am curious if anyone else has struggle with symbols. Basically it seems like for me, the only symbols I remember are the ones that are so obvious (I guess) that it couldn't possible be something else. Or its universal across most/all apps. Even apps that I use daily, if its a symbol unique to that app I am still going to go top to bottom or left to right mousing over until I find the one I am looking for.

(Disclaimer: I’m on mobile and definitely haven’t used this yet.) I feel like the problem of “I don’t know the shortcut to do this” is solved for my by hitting ⌘? And searching the menus for a keyword, then hitting enter. How do you see this as improving upon that? Is this something you have to set up per app? Because if it doesn’t automatically populate its options with actions I use a lot but don’t use the shortcut for that seems like a miss :)

Just a heads up, the marketing site has really bad scroll performance on Android Firefox.

Pie menus discussed 6 months ago, 69 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39206966

Scrolling the website is painful in Safari latest