Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again

capiche.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 279 posts

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

#111

Post by Tagbert »

analog31 wrote: post #108

The 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 "driver…

I think that there will always be a dynamic balance between GUI interactions and command line interactions.

Command line is efficient and good for applications and function that you use on a regular basis, but can be difficult with apps that you are new to or only use occasionally.

A proper UI should be able to accommodate both the efficiency of familiarity and the discoverability for a novice.

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

#112

Post by kymaz »

wildrhythms wrote: post #58
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #13

Every 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.

Back in the day I used Alfred on OS X... basically a system-wide command palette. Lots of its features now exist in Spotlight natively- not just file/folder search- it can do math equations, dictionary lookups, email search with date/keyword matching, currency and unit conversions, language translation, it also supports boolean operators. I have yet to find a similar functionality from any other OS.

And even better, you can just go into system preferences and turn off what you don't want!

At one point I had a newish version of OS X spotlight pared down to be about as functional as the Windows 7 start menu Search. If I had wanted command-space to be closer in feature parity to a Windows 10 start menu, it's approximately five reasonably intuitive mouse clicks to get to the settings prefpane with those checkboxes. I too have yet to find similarly well made functionality from any other major-ish desktop OS.

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

#114

Post by fnord77 »

jakear wrote: post #54
tshaddox wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually doesn’t seem like that bad of an idea to me, at least under the assumption that you’re not going to maintain an entirely separate UI for the mobile and desktop apps (which would be ideal, but is incredibly expensive and tends to result in broken and missing features on one or both platforms even for companies with enormous budgets). I would argue that “reducing to the lowest common denominator” actually i…

Best option is to provide choice. Icons with Labels by default, show keyboard shortcut on hover. Want just icons? There’s a config option for that. Want just labels? Also an option. Want no toolbar at all, and only use shortcuts? Also an option.

abundance of choice is inversely correlated with satisfaction

https://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bschwar1/Sci.Amer.pdf

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

#115

Post by jakear »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #77
jakear wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best option is to provide choice. Icons with Labels by default, show keyboard shortcut on hover. Want just icons? There’s a config option for that. Want just labels? Also an option. Want no toolbar at all, and only use shortcuts? Also an option.

I clicked your profile to see exactly who would come up with such an odd take, and then it made sense. I actually agree with you that this type of deep customisation is great for a "productivity tool" like VS Code. For something that people don't spend hours of every day in, though (say, a weather app), you don't need or want this level of customisation.

Hah, such a sleuth :)

Though I was actually thinking of SketchUp when writing that. VS Code does not provide always-visible labels for icons (tooltip only), though it’s something we’ve discussed and I’m in favor of. I believe Teams recently adopted them.

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

#116

Post by tkgally »

tambourine_man wrote: post #43

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…

I'm an academic, on the humanities/social sciences side of things, and I have the impression that a fair proportion of my colleagues are power users as you define it. They don’t do programming per se, but they customize their software, write macros for their own use, and may occasionally venture into the command line. I fall into that category myself. I don’t know any who are smartphone tap-only users.

My colleagues in the sciences are, not surprisingly, even more computer savvy, though I don't know how many do actual programming.

Five years ago, there was a literature professor in my department who didn't even use a computer and had to be contacted by telephone, fax, or—gasp—a handwritten note slipped under his office door, but he has since retired.

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

#117

Post by codr7 »

imgabe wrote: post #100
tambourine_man wrote: post #43

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…

I can't speak to every field but in Architecture/Engineering the software became a lot less power user friendly with the switch from AutoCAD to Revit. AutoCAD had a command line. You could pick commands from the menu, or type them directly. You could make shortcuts for the commands. From there it was a short jump to stringing together several typed commands into a short script. There was a built-in scripting language…

Serious apps should come with event logs and command lines, period.

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

#118

Post by melony »

tambourine_man wrote: post #43

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…

Software engineering is better understood and commoditized. The dangers of poor no-code solutions is also now well recognized. If you have the budget for an in-house IT team, then having custom glue software is perfectly viable. Or you can pay for Airtable/Zapier or RPA tools. Ad-hoc solutions provided by the OS to automate desktop software just doesn't make sense in a world dominated by cloud services with APIs readily available and cross-platform desktop GUIs that don't follow platform conventions. For niche software like CAD and EDA, vendor lock-in and deplatforming certainly should be bigger concerns for users but there simply are not enough suppliers. It is difficult for small players to break the inertia of vendors that predate the modern internet and who had established customer relationships before the SaaS model was even a glimmer in the Salesforce founder's eye.

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

#119

Post by wizzwizz4 »

tambourine_man wrote: post #89
behnamoh wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I've been learning MS Word for many years at the level of creating my own templates and styles, using macros, assigning my own shortcut keys to building blocks, and using snippets in conjunction with AHK. My documents look exactly like Latex files with SVG images and nice look, but with __so much__ less trouble. Anyone who thinks Word is not capable of typesetting excellent documents has not given it a shot.…

Word is not my cup of tea, but I've seen people doing CD covers, with multiple folding, the art on the back of box, on the CD itself, all in Word. They exported a PDF, sent to the printer and it worked. I've learned to respect this beast, thankfully, from a safe distance.

Microsoft Word is powerful enough to do anything you want it to… so long as it stays on one computer, and you don't reconfigure your fonts, or your monitor, or change Word version. Hence the PDF export, I presume.

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

#120

Post by wizzwizz4 »

fnord77 wrote: post #114
jakear wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best option is to provide choice. Icons with Labels by default, show keyboard shortcut on hover. Want just icons? There’s a config option for that. Want just labels? Also an option. Want no toolbar at all, and only use shortcuts? Also an option.

abundance of choice is inversely correlated with satisfaction https://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bschwar1/Sci.Amer.pdf

When the extra choices are useless, and the few choices are genuinely the best ones, sure. That's not what we're seeing.
Post reply on HN