Hear me out. I think a simple toolbar (off by default) would improve the UX for certain users. I have to type with an onscreen keyboard (macOS Accessibility Keyboard) and that makes keyboard shortcuts annoying. It would be nice to have focus in/out buttons I could activate in one click. Edge case for sure, I admit. Current workaround is to use the menu bar.
Thanks for bringing this up, it’s something that I wouldn’t have thought of myself.
Few thoughts…
First, I think Bike is likely to end up with an off by default toolbar in the end. At the same time I want to avoid adding it too soon, once added hard to change. In particular I wonder if I can get away with just window title bar buttons, or if I need to support the default full sized toolbar.
Second, bike has bad/no accessibility support right now. In particular there’s no voice over in the outline. I think (maybe naively) that an outline editor can be much more efficient for accessible navigation than a text editor. I’m still busy with basic 1.0 bugs and requests at the moment. Once I get more breathing room I plan to spend a chunk of time investigating accessibility in general. I’ll definite consider this request then if it hasn’t already been addressed.
I didn’t know about the macOS Accessibility Keyboard.
Digging through the documentation I see something called Panel Editor. I don’t quite know what it does, but it looks promising. It seems like you can build a Bike specific panel for the accessibly keyboard with custom buttons. And those custom buttons can run an AppleScript.
Have you tried the panel editor before? If you think it would work I can write Focus In / Out AppleScripts for you to attach to some panel buttons.
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Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this. Yes, I actually make extensive use of the Panel Editor. I have quite a few custom buttons. I could certainly add some buttons for focusing in/out. I don’t why I didn’t think of doing that. In this case AppleScript wouldn’t be necessary. Custom buttons can run key combos.
I wish the macOS Accessibility Keyboard could show multiple floating panels at once. Would be cool to have my normal keyboard panel along with an app-specific one. Anyway, I might be able to squeeze some more buttons on this guy. 
Still glad to hear there may be buttons of some sort coming to Bike one day.
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Another thought going forward… once Bike settles in a bit more I’ll be adding more keyboard shortcuts to outline mode.
Keyboard shortcuts in outline mode don’t need control/option/command chords since there’s no text input to disambiguate. Instead they can just be single key actions such as “f” to focus in and “o” to focus out.
I think panel editor solution is best for now, but I think longer term there will be other good ways too.
Ohhh, yeah that would be handy as well.