DevLog #2

Most of this week went into code that isn't mine. That's new for me.

I use Vorssaint every day. It's an open source Mac utility app that bundles a pile of small tools, window layout, clipboard history, a notch island, that kind of thing. My problem was dumb and constant: I have more than one display and I lose the pointer all the time. Window Layout could already throw a window to the next screen with a shortcut, but the pointer itself had nothing. So I kept dragging the mouse across screens like it's 2009.

Before writing a single line I went through the repo's closed PRs to see what gets merged and what gets closed. The ones that land start with an issue, stay small, ship strings in all 13 languages the app supports, and say plainly what the author couldn't test. The ones that get closed are usually too big, or nobody asked for them. So I did it in that order. Opened issue #1867 on the 22nd asking for a shortcut that drops the pointer in the center of the next display, plus the same modifiers with 1, 2, 3 to jump straight to a specific screen. Opened the PR the same day. About 200 lines, no new permission, no dependency. Default shortcut was Control Command D. D for display. I was pretty pleased with myself.

Then review happened, and the maintainer left three comments. All three were right.

The digit keys had to go. My version quietly registered Control Command 1 through 9 as global hotkeys, shortcuts the user never recorded, and nothing else in the app knew they were taken. Other features could fail to register their own keys and nobody would know why. So I ripped out the digits, the screen observer behind them, and the sentence about them in all 13 translations. That commit was 31 lines in, 93 out. Deleting my own code felt weird for about five minutes, then it just felt cleaner.

Control Command D was also a bad default, because that's macOS Look Up. I had actually flagged that myself in the issue, so no surprise there. It's now Control Option Command Z, on the layer the app keeps free, right next to the modifiers so one left hand does the whole thing.

The last one was a real bug I wouldn't have caught on my own. The way I was finding the pointer's current screen missed it whenever the pointer sat on the very top edge, up in the menu bar. Press the shortcut there and it could just do nothing. I switched to the same check the app's brightness shortcuts already use and tested it by flinging the pointer into the menu bar way more times than a normal person would.

Merged on the 24th. Two days from issue to merge. What shipped is a lot smaller than what I opened, and it's better for it. I learned more from that review than from writing the first draft.

Then on the 27th Vorssaint 3.4.0 came out. The release notes say new shortcuts help move windows and the pointer between displays, and down in the thank you section, somewhere among 80 other people, there's @ancoesat. It's one handle in a long list, and I'm not going to pretend I didn't grin.

Outside of Vorssaint, the little Spotify "now playing" widget got its own repo. It shows what I'm listening to, or the last track when nothing is on, and anyone with a Next.js site can drop it in. Three files, and your Spotify credentials never leave the server. Most of the README is the refresh token dance, because that's the only annoying part of the whole thing.

The site also speaks three languages now: English, Turkish and French. Every page moved under a locale folder, there's a language switcher, and a dictionary file that is about to get very long. It took a couple of follow up commits literally named "Additional fixes" and "Additional fixes2", which tells you how the first try went. I also fixed a bug in the GitHub contributions board on the homepage while I was in there.

I just wanted to stop losing my mouse. Now my name is on a merged PR in an app I use every day.