TrackShort reads the touch surface of your Mac's trackpad — not the cursor — recognises the shape you trace, and runs what you bound to it. A shell command, a shortcut, an app, a system control. Any shape you can draw.
Draw here — a circle, a check, an arrow
Try it. This pad runs the same $P recognizer the app does — what matches here matches there.
No vocabulary to memorise. Draw a shape once, choose what it does, and the shape is the shortcut from then on.
Press ⌥space, or rest three fingers on the pad and skip the key. Normal scrolling and swiping are untouched.
A HUD maps the pad 1:1, so the trail sits exactly under your finger. Any size, any corner, any direction.
The shape is matched as a point cloud in about two milliseconds and the action lands in the app that was in front. The HUD never takes focus.
A gesture runs a shell command in your login shell, sends a key combination to the front app, opens a file, folder, app or link, or drives a system control. Tap a shape to see it drawn.
Two-stroke shapes — , , a T, a plus — work too: pause briefly, draw the second stroke. Starting from a different corner or drawing it backwards still matches.
Every confident match teaches a gesture how you actually draw it. The figures are from public datasets of real handwriting — 5,280 unistroke and 9,581 multistroke gestures from 31 people at three speeds.
Most gesture tools watch the mouse pointer, so your shape is scaled by pointer speed, trapped inside the screen, and lost when the cursor hits an edge. TrackShort reads the trackpad's own contact data, normalised to the pad's rectangle.
On your Mac, only. Gestures, recognition and learning stay in a local database. No analytics, no crash reporting.
One network call. Once a day the app sends its license key and a device id to confirm the key is valid. Offline, it keeps working for 14 days.
Two permissions. Input Monitoring to see your fingers; Accessibility only for gestures that press keys.
Your key is issued the moment payment clears, shown on your account page, and emailed to you. No password to make.
Anything else — hello@mavistools.co. A person replies.
Any Mac on macOS 11 or later with a Multi-Touch trackpad — built in, or a Magic Trackpad. Apple silicon and Intel.
Input Monitoring, so it can see where your fingers are — that's the whole product. Accessibility only for gestures that press keys or drive system controls; you're asked the first time you make one.
No. Gestures, recognition and learning all happen on your Mac. The only network call is the once-a-day license check: your key and a device id, nothing else.
Yes. If it can't reach the license service it keeps working for 14 days on the last good check, and says so in Settings.
Yes. A key works on two Macs at once. Press Release this device in the app on the old Mac, or release it from your account page here if the old Mac is gone.
No. TrackShort only listens while summoned — after the shortcut, or while three fingers are down if you turn that on.
No — an Apple Developer certificate is a paid yearly subscription, and this is a one-person product at a one-time price. Install with Homebrew (brew install --cask mavistools/tap/trackshort) and there's no warning at all. Download the DMG directly and macOS warns you once; the install page shows the two clicks past it, with each release's SHA-256 to verify.
TrackShort tells you in Settings → About when a newer version is out and links to the download. It never replaces itself silently: macOS ties your Input Monitoring permission to the exact app it was granted to, so a self-replacing app would quietly lose the ability to read your trackpad.
Reply to your receipt within 14 days for a full refund. The key stops working; that's all.