Menus and keyboard shortcuts

Where the shortcuts are listed

Help → Keyboard Shortcuts opens a window listing every command in every menu, grouped by the menu it belongs to and in the same order the menu itself draws them. It is a window rather than a settings page on purpose: a list you have to stop working to go and read is a list nobody reads.

A few commands have no shortcut (About Float is one), and those are listed too, with a dash where the shortcut would be, so you can read the window straight down against the menu bar and find nothing missing.

Above the menus, under Anywhere on your Mac, is the one shortcut that is not in a menu: the one that opens quick capture from any app. Float comes with one set and you can change it, so the window shows whatever it is set to, or Not set if you have cleared it, with a link to the setting that changes it.

That window is built from the same table the menus themselves use, so it cannot fall out of step with the app. This help does not repeat the shortcuts, because a second copy of that list would be wrong within a month and you would have no way to tell which one to believe.

What is in each menu

Float: About, and Settings.
File: a new todo, printing what you are looking at, and Sync Now. New Todo is greyed out while Low Tide or a reminder's screen is open, because the box would open behind it; from search, Done or the Trash it takes you back to your list first.
Edit: the standard Mac menu, untouched: undo, redo, cut, copy, paste, delete, select all, and the usual text commands. Exactly what you already know from every other app.
View: the standard Mac items for the window, such as Enter Full Screen. Float adds nothing here.
Go: the places you can be, then two rows that move the list you are already looking at, in this order: Today, Everything, Anchored, Done, Trash, Search, Go to top of list and Go to bottom of list. The first five are the five numbered shortcuts, in the order the numbers run, and they sit together as one group; a line sets Search apart, and another the two rows that move the list. Anchored is greyed out when you have nothing anchored. Done, Trash and Search are greyed out while you are typing a todo, or have Low Tide or a reminder's screen open, so none of them opens over something you have not finished.
Todo: Float's own actions, all working on the todo you have selected and all greyed out when you have not selected one: complete, float or unfloat, surface, sink, anchor or unanchor, the five fields, the two defer steps, and Move to Trash. Anchor is greyed out on a todo with no date, and on one that is already due and not anchored, because there is no day ahead for it to wait for. On an anchored todo it reads Unanchor instead, even once its day has come. Surface and sink are greyed out on an anchored todo that is still waiting for its day, because anchored todos keep to the order of their dates. So are the two defer steps, which count from today and would bring it back within a week. Once its day comes, they all work on it again.
Window and Help: the standard Mac menus, plus Keyboard Shortcuts and this help.

There is no quick capture item in the File menu. There was, and it was removed: quick capture is for capturing when Float is not the app in front of you, and by the time you have pulled down Float's own File menu, New Todo is the command you want. The quick capture panel is still one keystroke away from anywhere (see Capturing a todo), and the menu bar icon offers it too, as Open quick capture, printing whatever shortcut you have set.

The two rows that move the list

Go to top of list and Go to bottom of list are the only two rows in Go that do not change what you are looking at. They move the list you already have: back to the start, greeting and open sky included, or down to the end of it.

Going to the top is also a tap on the lens button you are already on, on both a Mac and an iPhone. Going to the bottom has no such gesture, because that button already means one thing and cannot mean two. It is worth knowing about at all because a new todo goes to the end of the list, so the end is where you land after adding one, and getting back was a long drag before these existed.

Both are greyed out while you are typing, because the keys they use belong to the text field then, and both go grey while you have Done or the Trash, Low Tide, a reminder's screen or search open; the list underneath is not the thing you are looking at, so moving it would be work you could not see.

Where the Home and End keys are

These two rows are the only ones in Float that use a key on its own, with nothing held down: Home goes to the top, End goes to the bottom. Those are the keys every Mac app uses for the two ends of a long document, which is why they are the ones Float uses too.

Most Mac laptops do not have a Home or an End key, and the shortcut shown in the menu is a small corner arrow that does not tell you much. On a laptop keyboard:

Home is fn and the left arrow.
End is fn and the right arrow.

On a desktop keyboard with a number pad, they are the keys already labelled Home and End, above the arrows.

This is the one place the help spells a shortcut out, and it is here because it is a fact about your keyboard rather than a fact about Float: the corner arrows in the menu are unreadable if nobody tells you they mean fn and an arrow. Everything else about the keys stays in the Keyboard Shortcuts window, where there is only ever one copy of it.

What Select All and Delete are for

The Edit menu is the standard Mac one, and two of its items look out of place in a list app.

Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete and Select All act on the text you are editing: a title you are typing, a note you have open. That is all they have ever done. When you are looking at the list rather than typing in it, there is no text for them to act on, so they are greyed out.

They are not Float commands and they will not touch a todo. Move to Trash is the command that acts on a todo, and it is in the Todo menu with the rest of Float's own actions.

One shortcut does two things

The Edit menu's Undo is the normal Mac one, and it works on text: what you are typing in a title or a note.

The same key also undoes your last completion, move to the Trash, defer, unfloat or snooze, or a move you made from a reminder's screen, but only while the little notice about it is still on screen. That second job has no menu item of its own, which is why it is worth saying here: if the notice is showing, undo takes back what you just did to the todo; the rest of the time it behaves normally.

There is no redo for that. Re-completing something is a new action, not a redo.

Settings stay in Settings

Light and dark mode, and live weather: neither is duplicated into the menu bar. The Go menu lists places you can be, not how they are drawn.