flash

Flash and Vimac

Vimac was “Productive macOS keyboard-driven navigation”: hint mode and scroll mode over the Accessibility tree, triggered by holding Space, written in Swift under GPL-3. Its README now says “Vimac is now Homerow”; the last code commit was in April 2021, there are no GitHub releases, no Homebrew cask, and the project website did not answer when checked. It matters as the ancestor of Homerow and as the 2020 Show HN that made system-wide hints a known category.

	Vimac	Flash
License, price	GPL-3, free, discontinued	MIT, free
Platforms	macOS 10.14+	macOS 14+
Permissions	Accessibility	Accessibility; Automation per browser for tab lists; Screen Recording only for :screenshot
Hints from	Accessibility tree: frontmost window, menu bar, extras, Notification Center	Accessibility tree; tmux panes; VS Code enhancer
Pointer modes	Hint mode (click, Shift right-click, Cmd double-click, Option move), scroll mode	Hints, search, grid, bisect, pointer mode, drag, select, words, path, sticky
Configuration	Preferences window	One TOML file, live reload, CLI
Maintenance	None since 2021	1.0.0, October 2026

Where Vimac was stronger

• Runs on macOS 10.14 to 13 machines that cannot install Flash.
• GPL source of a complete, once-popular hint implementation, including its “Electron Support” and “Emulate VoiceOver” switches, is useful reading for anyone building such a tool.

Where Flash is stronger

• It is maintained.
• Grid, search, drag, selection, per-app mappings, a persistent NORMAL mode, terminal hints, flashlight, bar, widgets, popups and plugins.
• A file instead of preferences, so a setup survives a reinstall.

Flash features you might like

• Hold-to-activate is not how Flash works, but a single hotkey does the same job: mouse_target shows labels, Escape dismisses.
• Vimac’s modifier clicks map to NORMAL prefixes: cf right-click, df double-click, mf move the pointer (normal mode).
• mouse_menubar and mouse_notifications cover the menu bar extras and Notification Center surfaces Vimac labelled.

Moving from Vimac

Vimac	Flash
Hold Space for hints	"cmd+shift+space" = ["flash", "mouse_target"]
Scroll mode, HJKL	NORMAL mode scroll keys, scroll_target to choose the area
Shift right-click, Cmd double-click, Option move	cf, df, mf in NORMAL; or hold the modifier while typing a label
Hint characters, text size	[hints] keys, hint appearance keys in config.default.toml
Forced keyboard layout	[app] keyboard_layout

Checked 2026-10-14 against the Vimac repository.

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