ShortcutDetective Is Dead. Here's the Modern Alternative

For over a decade, the answer to “which app is stealing my keyboard shortcut?” on a Mac was a tiny free utility called ShortcutDetective. You launched it, pressed the misbehaving combo, and it told you which app had intercepted the keystroke. Simple, focused, beloved.

If you’ve tried to use it recently, you already know how this story ends. It crashes, fails to launch, or sits there detecting nothing — and there is no update coming. This post covers what happened, and what to use instead on a modern Mac.

What ShortcutDetective was, and why people loved it

ShortcutDetective came from Irradiated Software, the developers behind SizeUp and Cinch. It did exactly one thing: it registered a listener, asked you to press a key combination, and reported which application consumed the event.

That one thing was genuinely valuable, because it answered the question macOS refuses to answer. When a global hotkey dies, both apps involved look correctly configured in their own settings — the conflict only exists in the intersection, and the system gives you no view of it. ShortcutDetective gave you a definitive answer in seconds, for free. It earned its place in a decade of “fix your Mac shortcuts” forum threads.

The current state: abandoned

Here is where things stand:

• Version 1.0, forever. The app never received a meaningful update after its initial release.
• No Apple Silicon build. It shipped years before the M1 existed and was never recompiled for arm64.
• Crashes on modern macOS. On Sequoia, the common experience is a crash on launch or an app that opens but detects nothing — its event-interception approach and permission handling predate years of macOS security changes.
• No support, no roadmap. Reddit threads going back to June 2025 ask for ShortcutDetective alternatives because the app no longer functions; nobody from the project has responded.

None of this is a knock on the original developers — free utilities go unmaintained all the time. But practically, if you’re on an Apple Silicon Mac running Sonoma or Sequoia, ShortcutDetective is not a tool you can use anymore.

What about KeyCue or KeyClu?

They come up in the same threads, but they solve a different problem. KeyCue (~$25, Ergonis) and KeyClu (free-ish, closed source) are shortcut viewers — cheat sheets that display the available shortcuts for your current app. Useful for learning shortcuts; useless for diagnosing why one stopped working. Neither detects conflicts. And macOS System Settings only flags collisions among its own built-in shortcuts, ignoring every third-party app.

The conflict-detection niche ShortcutDetective occupied was, until recently, simply empty.

What to use instead: HotkeyClash

HotkeyClash is a free, open-source (GPL-2.0) menu bar utility for macOS 14+ built specifically for shortcut conflict detection. One scan reads three sources:

1. Every running app’s menu bar shortcuts, via the Accessibility API
2. Automation configs — Karabiner-Elements (~/.config/karabiner/karabiner.json) and skhd (~/.config/skhd/skhdrc)
3. macOS system shortcuts from the symbolic hotkeys plist (Mission Control, Spotlight, Screenshots, and so on)

It groups every binding by key combination and flags any combo claimed two or more times, with severity:

• Definite (red): two global hotkeys on the same combo — a guaranteed clash.
• Potential (amber): a global hotkey overlapping an app’s menu shortcut — clashes only when that app is focused.

On a real machine, a scan covered 736 shortcuts across 10+ running apps and surfaced 114 conflicts in 3.2 seconds. Like ShortcutDetective, it’s free and local-only: zero external dependencies, no telemetry, no accounts, no network access.

The honest difference in approach

ShortcutDetective and HotkeyClash answer related questions with different models, and it’s worth being precise about this:

• ShortcutDetective was reactive and single-shot. You pressed one combo, live, and it told you which app intercepted that keystroke. Great for confirming a suspicion about one shortcut; blind to everything else.
• HotkeyClash is proactive and exhaustive. It scans all registered shortcuts and shows every conflict on the machine at once — including the ones you haven’t tripped over yet. Instead of testing one key, you get the full collision map.

For the classic use case — “my shortcut died, who took it?” — you get the answer either way: search HotkeyClash’s results for your combo and every claimant is listed. The scan model just also tells you about the other 113 conflicts you didn’t know you had.

One thing ShortcutDetective did that HotkeyClash doesn’t do today: the live “press a key and watch who grabs it” interception test. That mode is on the HotkeyClash roadmap for v2.0. Until then, the scan covers the same diagnostic ground from the other direction.

Side-by-side comparison

	ShortcutDetective	HotkeyClash
Status	Abandoned (v1.0, never updated)	Actively maintained
Apple Silicon	No (no arm64 build)	Yes, native
Works on Sequoia	No — crashes / fails	Yes (macOS 14+)
Detection model	Live: intercepts one pressed combo	Scan: all registered shortcuts at once
Menu bar shortcuts of running apps	No	Yes (Accessibility API)
Karabiner-Elements / skhd configs	No	Yes
macOS system shortcuts	No	Yes (symbolic hotkeys plist)
Conflict severity ranking	No	Definite / potential
Price	Free	Free, open source (GPL-2.0)
Telemetry / network	None	None
Install	Manual download (dead link era)	DMG from GitHub Releases (Homebrew Cask planned)

A more detailed breakdown lives on the ShortcutDetective comparison page.

Migration steps

Moving over takes about two minutes:

1. Remove ShortcutDetective. Drag the old app to the Trash. If it appears under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility, remove the stale entry while you’re there.
2. Install HotkeyClash. Download the DMG from the download page and drag it to Applications.
3. Grant Accessibility permission on first launch. This is what lets HotkeyClash read other apps’ menu shortcuts — the same class of permission ShortcutDetective needed for event interception. Without it, the scan still covers config files and system shortcuts, just not running apps’ menus.
4. Run a scan. Click the menu bar icon or press the default hotkey, ⌘⇧H. (If something on your Mac already claims that combo, the scan itself will tell you — change HotkeyClash’s hotkey in its settings.)
5. Work the results. Start with the red definite conflicts. HotkeyClash intentionally doesn’t rewrite other apps’ settings — you fix each conflict in the source app’s own preferences, then re-scan to confirm. If you want the fix-side walkthrough with app-specific steps, see how to find conflicting keyboard shortcuts on Mac.

The bottom line

ShortcutDetective was the right tool for its era, and its era is over: no Apple Silicon build, no updates since v1.0, and crashes on current macOS. HotkeyClash picks up the job with a broader model — instead of testing one keypress at a time, it maps every shortcut conflict on your Mac in a single three-second scan, stays entirely local, and costs the same: nothing. Download it, run one scan, and you’ll likely learn more about your Mac’s shortcut situation than ShortcutDetective could have told you in an afternoon.