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by tkainrad 1746 days ago
shortcutFoo is definitely a nice alternative.

However, there are a few things that I think KeyCombiner does better. I am very biased though ;)

- You can edit any combination in your lessons or personal collections. So, if you bind some VSCode bindings to keys that you are used to from Sublime, that's not a problem.

- There are quite sophisticated statistics regarding your practice performance. Most importantly, a confidence value for every combination

- You can create your own collections to practice by copying from public collections, manually defining your own combinations, doing CSV import,...

- There is a desktop app that mitigates conflicts with browser (extension) shortcuts

- The desktop app has an instant lookup feature that shows you the shortcuts of the current app (+ current browser tab on macOS), and all the combinations in your personal collection and lessons. You can trigger the instant lookup from anywhere via a global shortcut, so you don't need to leave your current context.

1 comments

That's great, thanks for chiming in!

If I could make a suggestion for KeyCombiner, I think that having a way to start out as an anonymous user (with no sign up or email confirmation) at first, and then asking users to sign up once they've completed a few lessons would make it even more appealing to try out.

The "Start Learning" button at the top right of your site IMHO should be a bit of a demo mode.

(I know that it's harder/messier to implement a "half anonymous" mode -- this is just a suggestion) :-)

I see your point and I wouldn't mind having something like that. However, much of KeyCombiner requires a database. It stores practice results, personal collections, you can change a lesson's combinations etc.

I feel like if I tried to do a demo mode without storage anonymous users would be left with a 2nd class experience and potentially think less of KeyCombiner.

However, there's already lots of things that anonymous users can do: Browse all public collections, courses, and lessons. Use the practice demo on the home page. Search through KeyCombiner's entire database of public shortcuts. And more.

Why not let “semi” anonymous users — i.e. they’d be identified by a session cookie, but you wouldn’t know their email - use your database and store a bit of info there, but limit what they can do at the application level i.e. don’t let them complete more than 3 lessons for instance?