Shortcut help

Most of the time you pick a chord and it just works. This is for the other times.

Mostly this page exists so that when a key doesn’t do anything, you can work out whose fault it is in about ten seconds. That sounds like a small thing. It isn’t — “the app is broken” and “something else took that key” feel identical from where you’re sitting, and they have completely different fixes.

When you press the key and nothing happens

Three different things cause this, and they are not equally bad.

macOS already owns the key Spotlight, Mission Control, screenshots. The system gets there first, every time, so Eddy never sees the press. Eddy checks for these while you’re picking and will tell you. One switch in System Settings.

Another app’s menu uses it Chrome, Xcode, your editor. Here Eddy actually wins — he sees the key before the app does. Your shortcut works, and that app quietly loses the key while TellEddy is running.

A background app grabbed it A launcher, a clipboard tool, a window manager. This is the one Eddy cannot see — nothing on the Mac can ask what hotkeys another background app registered.

That last row is why setup asks you to press the chord in a real app before you finish. It’s the only check that tests the whole path instead of TellEddy’s own window, where Eddy always wins and everything looks fine. It’s also why a clean check says nothing I can see rather than nothing. We’d rather be honest about the gap than let you find it the hard way.

Telling “Eddy is broken” from “something took my key”

Worth knowing, because the fixes have nothing to do with each other.

If every shortcut stopped at once

It’s almost never a conflict. It’s the Accessibility permission getting switched off or reset, which macOS does on some updates — and without it Eddy never sees your keys at all.

Eddy will say so. The menu bar gets a Shortcuts aren’t working row at the top, with a button that takes you straight to the right pane. Turn the permission back on and Eddy picks up on his own. No restart.

If one shortcut stopped and the rest are fine

Something else took that key. Change yours in Preferences → Shortcuts, or find the other app and change it there.

Two permissions, one shortcut

A TellEddy shortcut touches two, and when shortcuts stop working it’s almost always the first:

Accessibility is what the global key tap runs on. Without it Eddy never sees the press — and it’s also what does the acting: reading your selection, pasting text back. Check this one first.
Input Monitoring is requested alongside it and lives in the same place.

Both are in System Settings → Privacy & Security.

Changing your mind

Nothing you pick during setup is permanent. Preferences → Shortcuts lets you rebind anything, switch an action between hold-to-talk and tap-to-toggle, or turn one off entirely — and switching one off hands the key back to your other apps instead of Eddy holding it system-wide.

Two things worth knowing while you’re in there:

Hold shortcuts are side-specific; chords aren’t. Holding right ⌘ means the right one. But ⌃⌥D fires from either side of the keyboard.
⌥ types characters; ⌃ and ⌘ don’t. ⌥E starts an accent, so Eddy won’t let you bind it — it would put junk into whatever you were typing in.

The default set

Fresh installs get ⌃⌥ plus a letter: D dictate, R read aloud, S summarize and read, N notepad. That corner is quiet on most Macs — it’s the one that collides least with what’s already installed.

If you’ve been using TellEddy since before that was the default, your existing shortcuts were left exactly as they were. Eddy doesn’t move bindings you already chose.