The keyboard shortcuts, sadly, aren’t exactly the same as the ones used by Twitter a decade and a half ago, but they’re easy enough to learn if you check the menu bar. (Command-R for reply, Command-L to like, and Command-T to repost are just a few.)
Aeronaut also supports notifications, which is useful if you’ve been regularly finding replies to your posts days after the fact, like I’ve been. I appreciate that you can configure which kinds of notifications you want—I generally only want to be notified if someone says something to me and not when they quickly press the like button. And you can have different notification settings for different Bluesky accounts.
What ties everything together, though, is the polish. This application makes Bluesky fit right in with the other windows on my Mac desktop, which is exactly what I wanted.
There are a few things that this application decidedly is not. There’s no support for multiple columns, meaning you can’t use it as an alternative to the Tweetdeck of yore. There’s no simple way I could find for creating a thread. And Aeronaut is also not completely free.
The application offers a free version, which lets you can scroll through your feed and like or repost things. If you want to write posts, or reply to posts, you’ll need to pay for a subscription, which costs $2 per month. It’s yet another subscription, granted, but it supports the development of an application that likely couldn’t exist otherwise. If you, like me, prefer your microposts in a small window, that price might be worth it.
