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Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again

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Re: Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again

#41

Post by jrochkind1 »

blondin wrote: post #8

> "People need to feel that they can try things without damaging the system," recommended Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. well, for what it's worth, many modern apps aren't following that guideline. for a long time i have questioned the disappearance of tooltips in user interfaces. especially when everybody seems to come up with their own iconography nowadays. the answer i got from UX people is that "you can't ho…

I don't understand the relationship you are suggesting between tooltips and feeling that you can try things without damaging the system.

Re: Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again

#42

Post by seanwilson »

On Windows, you could press ALT to navigate the menu bar: each menu item would have a letter underlined to tell you how to select it, and when you picked a letter the menu would expand and each new item would have an underlined item etc. So you quickly discover and commit to muscle memory that ALT + F + S would select File then Save. This worked for dialog pop-up options as well so you didn't have to click.

You can't do this on Mac? Why? I found this really jarring. I know on Mac you can press CTRL + F2 (add Fn key if you have one) to change the keyboard focus to the menus but it doesn't underline the letters that will work and you have to hit enter to open things so it's clunky.

The command palette is nice for discovery of lesser used commands and when there's lots of them but it's less predictable what keys you need to press to fuzzy search to the command you know is there and it doesn't teach your fingers the shortest key combo to trigger it.

Re: Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again

#43

Post by tambourine_man »

Something I've been noticing lately is the disappearance of the “power user”.

Someone who's not a programer, but has learned lots of smart and efficient ways to getting their computer work done over the years. Shortcuts (keyboard or otherwise), click-hold-cmd-tab-drop or similar patterns, tags/labels for deep file organization, etc.

It seems like there's now a much wider gap between the smartphone tap-only user and the Vim/Terminal ubergeek with almost nothing in between.

I remember being floored by bureau in the 90s that completely automated their Photoshop and QuarkXPress workflow with AppleScript just by hitting the record button (not a single line of code written), folder actions, smart file placement and similar tricks.

Re: Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again

#44

Post by tshaddox »

Xevi wrote: post #24
blondin wrote: post #8

> "People need to feel that they can try things without damaging the system," recommended Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. well, for what it's worth, many modern apps aren't following that guideline. for a long time i have questioned the disappearance of tooltips in user interfaces. especially when everybody seems to come up with their own iconography nowadays. the answer i got from UX people is that "you can't ho…

> the answer i got from UX people is that "you can't hover or have tooltips on mobile". they are trying to achieve uniformity between mobile and desktop. Yes you can. The generally agreed upon way to do this is by long pressing whatever you want to see a tooltip over.

I’m not aware of anyone agreeing to that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mobile UI that shows tooltips when you long press on a button.

Re: Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again

#45

Post by jiehong »

Emacs always has an embryonic version of that with M-x, but with a simple autocomplete. That’s is, until Helm arrived in 2011: it made everything that is a list something to be dynamically filtered (commands, shortcuts, buffers, files, etc).

IntelliJ has a command palette too (Ctrl-Shift-a), but it’s horribly slow and has many items with the same name doing different things (try looking for “settings” for example). But it does allow you to add a shortcut to a command you find on the fly, which is great.

[0] https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm

Re: Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again

#46

Post by miffy900 »

seanwilson wrote: post #42

On Windows, you could press ALT to navigate the menu bar: each menu item would have a letter underlined to tell you how to select it, and when you picked a letter the menu would expand and each new item would have an underlined item etc. So you quickly discover and commit to muscle memory that ALT + F + S would select File then Save. This worked for dialog pop-up options as well so you didn't have to click. You can't…

It is annoying, but CMD+? (help menu search) I think makes up for it. It's far more useful for when you're navigating an unfamiliar interface.

Re: Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again

#47

Post by n3t »

godDLL wrote: post #37
arusahni wrote: post #9

I'm okay with command palettes, but hate how they steal ctrl/cmd + k. I use that in Firefox to focus the search bar. If you implement such a shortcut, please make it configurable!

Wait, wasn't that Cmd-L?

ctrl+k → focus the search bar

ctrl+l → focus the address bar

Re: Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again

#48

Post by ok_dad »

blondin wrote: post #8

> "People need to feel that they can try things without damaging the system," recommended Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. well, for what it's worth, many modern apps aren't following that guideline. for a long time i have questioned the disappearance of tooltips in user interfaces. especially when everybody seems to come up with their own iconography nowadays. the answer i got from UX people is that "you can't ho…

see: the blackberry storm, which had hovering with a touch screen. I loved that phone.

Re: Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again

#49

Post by gabrielsroka »

tshaddox wrote: post #44
Xevi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the answer i got from UX people is that "you can't hover or have tooltips on mobile". they are trying to achieve uniformity between mobile and desktop. Yes you can. The generally agreed upon way to do this is by long pressing whatever you want to see a tooltip over.

I’m not aware of anyone agreeing to that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mobile UI that shows tooltips when you long press on a button.

That's the standard on Android, especially for the built-in apps.

https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/tooltips

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