Nova’s menu wayfinding

From its earliest days, Macs established an interesting convention – whenever you press a keyboard shortcut to an action that’s somewhere in the app menu, the matching top menu label blinks quickly. Here, I am pressing ⌘A (Edit > Select All), followed by ⌘+ (Format > Font > Bigger), and then ⌘B (Format > Font > Bold): I believe this is meant to help you connect those things better. While you might not need a map to an action that you already know a shortcut for, it might be helpful to tell you where to find other actions like it. I imagine it also helps whenever you press a wrong shortcut – or the right shortcut under the wrong circumstances – and you want to deduce what happened or what was meant to happen. Knowing roughly where a command “lives” makes it easier to open the menu and look for it, even if you might still have to dig through all the submenus. Recently, I spotted the programming editor Nova use a parallel technique. In its command palette, commands show their keyboard…