Click anything on your screen by typing its name.

Shortcat-style hints for GNOME on Wayland. Press Super B and pounce puts a two-letter code on everything you can click. Type the code, or the start of a label such as blu for Bluetooth, then press Enter.

Download for Ubuntu and Debian

Free to use anywhere, including at work. It contains no network code.

Type part of a name and the best match is outlined

You rarely need the code. blu is enough for Bluetooth and dl finds Downloads. Common words have aliases, so settings also finds a menu item called Preferences. Enter clicks the outlined match; Tab moves to the next one.

Icon-only buttons have a code you can type instead

A plus sign or a gear has no name you can see, so type the two letters on its tag. Shift+Enter right-clicks instead of clicking, which opens context menus.

The dock and top bar get codes as well as every visible window

pounce reads the screen through the Linux accessibility interface, the one screen readers use, and draws its codes with a small GNOME Shell extension. That covers GNOME apps, Firefox, LibreOffice, and Electron apps such as VS Code.

Install

Add the pounce repository so updates arrive with your other system updates:

curl -fsSL https://pounce.harshcom.in/key.gpg \
  | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/pounce.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/pounce.gpg] https://pounce.harshcom.in/apt stable main" \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pounce.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install pounce
pounce setup

Signing key fingerprint: 926B A38C A1B1 F055 54D0 3A28 CE92 3D4B 1F32 A9DA

Or download pounce_0.1.3_all.deb and run sudo apt install ./pounce_0.1.3_all.deb, then pounce setup. Log out and back in once when it asks you to.

What `pounce setup` changes

It asks before each one, and pounce setup --undo puts each one back.

Accessibility: org.gnome.desktop.interface toolkit-accessibility set to true
Electron apps: ~/.config/environment.d/60-pounce.conf with ACCESSIBILITY_ENABLED=1
App launchers: Copies of the launchers of Electron apps and Chromium browsers, such as VS Code, Slack and Chrome, in ~/.local/share/applications, that add --force-renderer-accessibility
Extension: pounce@pounce.dev added to your enabled extensions
Hotkey: A custom shortcut, Super+B, that runs pounce
Service: The pounced user service, started at login

To remove pounce completely, run pounce setup --undo and then sudo apt remove pounce.

Known gaps

Apps that were already open when accessibility was switched on show no codes until you restart them.
The on-screen codes need GNOME 42 or newer. On other desktops pounce opens a search window for the active app instead.
Some GTK4 list rows can't be activated directly, so pounce clicks them at their position.
Apps that ignore Linux accessibility are invisible to pounce, as they are to screen readers.

I wrote pounce because I kept reaching for the mouse to click one small thing: a toggle in Settings, a button in a dialog, a folder in the sidebar. On a Mac, Shortcat fixed that years ago. Nothing did the same for GNOME on Wayland, so I built it, and it's the first thing I install on a new machine now.

If pounce misses a button in an app you use, open an issue and tell me which app. That's the most useful bug report there is.

Harsh harshcom.in

Questions

Is pounce open source?: pounce is free but closed source. The GNOME Shell extension that draws the codes is GPL-2.0-or-later, and its source is on GitHub.
Does it send anything over the internet?: pounce has no network code. Updates come through apt, like any other package.
Why does it need accessibility switched on?: Apps only describe their buttons and menus to other programs when it's on. It's a standard GNOME setting and changes nothing you can see.
Does it work on X11?: Yes. GNOME on X11 works the same as on Wayland; tested on Ubuntu 22.04.
VS Code now says "Screen Reader Optimized".: VS Code notices that accessibility is on. To keep codes but turn that mode off, add "editor.accessibilitySupport": "off" to its settings.
Can I change the hotkey or the colours?: Yes, in Pounce Settings: the hotkey, light or dark, the accent colour, which windows get codes, and apps to leave alone.
Something isn't working.: Run pounce doctor. It checks each thing pounce depends on and says how to fix what's wrong.

Changes

0.1.3 3 November 2026

Chrome with more than one profile gets codes in the browser window, not only the profile picker. The accent colours in Pounce Settings show up on Pop!_OS.

0.1.2 3 November 2026

On X11, pressing the hotkey again closes the hints. Chrome, Chromium, Brave and Edge get codes on X11 too. The search window no longer crashes on Ubuntu 22.04 and Pop!_OS 22.04. New: pounce --version.

0.1.1 3 November 2026

VS Code, Slack and other Electron apps get codes on X11 too: pounce setup now starts them with --force-renderer-accessibility. Run pounce setup once after updating, then restart those apps.

0.1.0 30 October 2026

First release. Codes on every visible window, the top bar, the dock and desktop icons; search by name with aliases; Shift+Enter right-clicks; Pounce Settings; pounce setup (and --undo) and pounce doctor.