Keyboard shortcuts for masoc on Mac and iPad.

The arrow keys move a focus ring through the grid, and the grid scrolls along with it. Everything with ⌘ or ⌃ also sits in the menu bar.

Press a tool’s key again to leave it, or press ⎋. The number keys and the arrow keys rest while a tool is open, so they never act behind your back.

Undo, redo, reset, export and info use the same shortcuts as for photos.

On Mac the commands live in the menu bar. On iPad with a keyboard, iPadOS lists the same ones. Undo and Export follow you: in the editor they act on the photo, in the library Undo takes back a star and Export takes the selection.

A word from the developer. Photo editors are built around the pointer: grab a slider, drag, let go, grab the next one. Text editors like vi found another way decades ago, with modes, where the same keys do different things depending on the mode you’re in. masoc borrows the idea for its sliders.

Hold ⌥ for a quarter of a second. A small bar marks one slider and the others dim, so you always see which one the keys will move. On a page you open for the first time, that’s the top slider, Exposure on Light. Keep ⌥ down and the arrows work the sliders. Let go and the panel looks as before. Unlike vi, getting out is easy.

If your fingers reach for h, j, k and l: close, but it’s the arrow keys. Emacs fans get a modifier to hold down, so everyone feels at home.

How far one press goes

• Exposure. 0.05 EV a press, 0.50 EV with ⇧, anywhere from −5 to +5 EV.
• Contrast, Highlights, Saturation and most others. 1 a press, 10 with ⇧.
• Temp on RAW. One mired a press, shown in steps of 50 K. Around daylight, ⇧ moves it roughly 300 K.
• Hue Shift and the grading hues. 1° a press.
• Look intensity. 1 percent a press, from 0 to 120. ⌥⌫ sets it back to 100.

Hold an arrow key and it picks up speed: presses less than 0.15 seconds apart count as a run, and after 10 of them each press moves two steps, after 24 four. Every value lands on the slider’s step and stays inside its range, just like a drag. Each page remembers where you left the mark, ⌥↑ and ⌥↓ stop at the first and the last slider, and ⌥⇥ goes round from Looks back to Light. And every change lands in the undo history like any other edit.

A session, keys only

A JPEG, freshly opened. Eleven moves, no pointer.

1. 1Light
2. ⌥OptionholdThe mark lands on Exposure
3. ⌥Option→Right Arrow×6Exposure +0.30 EV
4. ⌥Option↓Down Arrow×2Contrast, then Highlights
5. ⌥Option⇧Shift←Left Arrow×3Highlights −30
6. ⌥Option⇥TabColor, the mark on Temperature
7. ⌥Option→Right Arrow×5Temperature +5
8. ⌥Option⌫DeleteSecond thoughts: Temperature 0
9. ⌥Optionlet goThe marks fade
10. SpaceholdBefore and after
11. ⌘CommandEExport. Trackpad untouched.

Slider mode works while no tool is open and the white balance picker is off. On Mac it steps aside while ⌘ or ⌃ is held and while you type in a text field, where ⌥← still jumps a word.

• ⌘ shortcuts sit in the menu bar. You can find them there, and they grey out when they don’t apply. Single keys like C, M and 1 to 4 live in the editor itself.
• The slider keys are no menu commands. A greyed-out menu item would swallow them while a tool is open.
• On Mac, masoc reads the slider keys from the event stream. A shortcut would beat a focused text field, where ⌥← and ⌥⌫ move and delete word by word.
• On iPad, ⌥ is heard through Game Controller. SwiftUI has no hook for a held modifier there, and UIKit only tells the focused view, but the hardware keyboard reports ⌥ on its own.
• The marks wait 250 milliseconds. On Mac, ⌥ with a scroll zooms the photo, and the marks shouldn’t flash across the panel every time.
• A key press is a drag in disguise. It runs through the same code as your finger: snapped to the step, kept in range, saved to the history.

masoc is being prepared for the App Store. Sign up for the newsletter, and you’ll hear first when it lands.