Rewire Text 1.2.0: your own hotkey for every transform

Rewire Text 1.2.0 is out. It is a keyboard release, and both of the big additions started as suggestions from early users.

Per-transform hotkeys. Until now, every transform went through the same door: press the global hotkey, then find the transform in the palette. That is fine for the long tail, but most people run the same three or four transforms all day. Pinning already helped there, since pinned transforms sit at the top of the palette, but you still had to open it and arrow down to the one you wanted. Now you can give any transform its own hotkey. Press it in any app and Rewire Text captures your selection and opens the palette with that transform already selected and running. You glance at the preview and press Enter. No searching, no arrow keys, no detour.

It sounds like a small change. In practice it removes the last bit of friction from the transforms you use constantly. Title Case on one hotkey, Proofread on another, Translate to Spanish on a third, and each one is a single keystroke away in whatever app you are in. You set them up in the new Settings › Hotkeys page, and the recorder flags conflicts with the global hotkey or your other assignments as you type them.

Skip the preview, if you dare. When you assign a transform hotkey, you can opt to apply the result immediately instead of stopping at the preview. The setting is called YOLO mode, because that is what it is. With it on, instant transforms paste straight back without showing the palette at all: select, press, done. AI transforms still open the palette while the result streams in, then apply it and close on their own. If a transform fails, the palette stays open so you can see what happened.

Vim mode. A power user asked for this one, and it made too much sense to refuse. Turn it on in Settings › General › Keyboard and the command palette answers to the home row: j and k to move, i to jump into the search box, Enter to apply, Esc to step back. It is off by default, and nothing changes if you leave it off. If you use Vim, you already know whether you want it.

And a few smaller things. The transform list in the full window now responds to the arrow keys even with Vim mode off. All hotkey settings, including the global hotkey, now live together in Settings › Hotkeys. And recording a hotkey finally works the natural way: hold the modifiers, press the key, done. The changelog has the full list.

Like the 1.1 release, much of this came straight from the people using the app. That is the feedback loop I want, so if something is missing or almost-but-not-quite right, tell me. You can get in touch here.