There really is something to be said about the Command Pallete and UX design as a whole. I started out using Sublime Text as that was the easiest out-of-the-gate editor. I then spent several years in a fully customized tmux + vim configuration. A lot of fun! But it got stale, and then I spent several years in Emacs. And then VSCode came along with a lot of conveniences, and thus I used that for a year or two. Now, almost a decade after teaching myself how to program and making a career out of it, I’m back to using a pretty bare bones Sublime environment. It does what I need and it does it fast. My inner quest to become The Poweruser has been replaced by a quaint appreciation of simplicity. Thanks Sublime! (though it should be said: I’ve always used Vim-bindings, the pinnacle, in all these apps)
Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again
101–110 of 279 posts
Re: Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an infrequent Mac user, how is this stuff discoverable? The OS seems willfully obfuscated to cater for some notional lowest common denominator user. Whenever I find myself using someone else's Mac, they never know any keyboard shortcuts or keyboard-plus-mouse-button context menus. It's bewildering and wildly frustrating. I find myself asking "surely this isn't how you always do this, there must be a better way?" b…
Most of the keyboard shortcuts for a particular application are right next to the menu item. The command palette I’m talking about is clearly visible in the help menu: my theory is that people no longer browse the menus of a new application the way I would back in the NT 4.0 days. The system-wide shortcuts are a bit less discoverable but, they’re there if you know where to look: either search “keyboard shortcuts” in…
Thanks for this, I'll be sure to check out the keyboard preferences next time. I was referring to the "command-shift-/" key combo you mentioned when asking how to discover things in Mac OS, since it really feels that power-user functionality is hidden.
I'm not exactly a Windows fan, but (generally speaking) in a standard windowed program, just hitting alt focuses the menu. Windows is almost entirely navigable by keyboard by default, without a mouse. It's much more discoverable and efficient.... although that's been tanking since Win 95 :)
Re: Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again
#103Every macOS application has a command palette in the help menu: command-shift-/ will bring it up and you can incrementally search all the commands in the menus.
As an infrequent Mac user, how is this stuff discoverable? The OS seems willfully obfuscated to cater for some notional lowest common denominator user. Whenever I find myself using someone else's Mac, they never know any keyboard shortcuts or keyboard-plus-mouse-button context menus. It's bewildering and wildly frustrating. I find myself asking "surely this isn't how you always do this, there must be a better way?" b…
I’d guess that most people don’t use keyboard shortcuts at all, and only very few use anything besides copy, paste, and maybe save. People are shocked when I “command+l, c, t, v, enter” to duplicate the current tab.
Re: Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I hate this trend. Give me back menus and toolbars. Everyone has their own preferences; personally, every time I open Word, I am confused and disoriented and have no idea where to look for what I want. I think it's best for no-one to try to impose their UI preference on everyone, and for all of us just to use the software with which we find it easiest to interact.
This is the way everyone not responsible for creating it has always viewed the Office Ribbon UI. Most cursed creation in software.
I know UI is subjective, but when the Ribbon was introduced I thought it was the best UI idea I had ever seen. It made the Office apps interface much more discoverable and easy to use than without it. It's a shame that the Ribbon paradigm is patented.
Re: Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the keyboard shortcuts for a particular application are right next to the menu item. The command palette I’m talking about is clearly visible in the help menu: my theory is that people no longer browse the menus of a new application the way I would back in the NT 4.0 days. The system-wide shortcuts are a bit less discoverable but, they’re there if you know where to look: either search “keyboard shortcuts” in…
Thanks for this, I'll be sure to check out the keyboard preferences next time. I was referring to the "command-shift-/" key combo you mentioned when asking how to discover things in Mac OS, since it really feels that power-user functionality is hidden. I'm not exactly a Windows fan, but (generally speaking) in a standard windowed program, just hitting alt focuses the menu. Windows is almost entirely navigable by keyb…
That command-shift-/ shortcut is listed in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts.
Also, if I use the Finder help menu to search "keyboard shortcuts", it gives me a local help article "Use macOS keyboard shortcuts". This article talks about a bunch of ways to find keyboard shortcuts and also links to this knowledge base article: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236 (This is actually a sort of step backwards, from when I did exactly this around '07: at that point, the Mac Help system actually listed a bunch of handy keyboard shortcuts and didn't rely on online resources for them).
Re: Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like to have both. AutoCAD is an example of a (very) complex application which has both.
Cod(e/ium) requires Ctrl+Shift+P to actively engage its command palette. AutoCAD strikes me as a fundamentally different paradigm in that its command interface is "always active" so to speak, whereas menus/toolbars feel mostly like an optional overlay, at least to an experienced user. Although AutoCAD is my preferred tool when drafting electrical architectures and wiring diagrams, the mouse as primary human interface…
I've found AutoCAD can operate similar to how you describe Altium, in that pressing 'l' and enter gives you a line, typing 'str' gets you stretch, 'tr' gets you trim, shift-clicking with trim gets you the opposite of trim - extend. The command line has autocomplete. In this fashion, one hand operates the keyboard, and your other stays on the mouse.
I quickly fell in love with this interface and immediately switched to using the command line for the vast majority of functions.
Re: Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the keyboard shortcuts for a particular application are right next to the menu item. The command palette I’m talking about is clearly visible in the help menu: my theory is that people no longer browse the menus of a new application the way I would back in the NT 4.0 days. The system-wide shortcuts are a bit less discoverable but, they’re there if you know where to look: either search “keyboard shortcuts” in…
Thanks for this, I'll be sure to check out the keyboard preferences next time. I was referring to the "command-shift-/" key combo you mentioned when asking how to discover things in Mac OS, since it really feels that power-user functionality is hidden. I'm not exactly a Windows fan, but (generally speaking) in a standard windowed program, just hitting alt focuses the menu. Windows is almost entirely navigable by keyb…
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Re: Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again
#108The complexity of software has caught up with the GUI. Getting a generation of people to approach and use computers was great. But the GUI was never "intuitive" unless "intuitive" means that you can be trained to recognize a certain number of symbols. And that number is finite, when they're always changing.
Here's how it struck me like a freight train: I was looking at some instructions for installing certain "drivers" for some technical hardware. The instructions for Windows computers was a series of color glossy screen shots, with circles and arrows, and a paragraph under each one. Of course they were particularly hard to follow because they hadn't been updated to the last revision of the OS.
In contrast, the Linux instructions were:
sudo apt install foo bar blah ...
sudo add a line to this file ...
Press Windows-R+cmd, enter these commands
Re: Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again
#109There really is something to be said about the Command Pallete and UX design as a whole. I started out using Sublime Text as that was the easiest out-of-the-gate editor. I then spent several years in a fully customized tmux + vim configuration. A lot of fun! But it got stale, and then I spent several years in Emacs. And then VSCode came along with a lot of conveniences, and thus I used that for a year or two. Now, al…
I went through a series of phases just like you're describing, but I eventually settled on vim + COC as my "home" editor. The COC plugin has been a game changer for me; all of the conveniences of a language server without the bloat of a full-featured editor like VS Code.
Re: Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again
#110Something 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…
Power users are just "disappearing". Modern UIs made it impossible to be a power user.
Either you learn 490 tools, methodologies, framework, libraries and become a developer or push button on apps.
The distance between the two extremes is increasing and the middle ground is disappearing.