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

161–170 of 279 posts

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

#161

Post by sidpatil »

themodelplumber wrote: post #142
jiehong wrote: post #45

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). B…

Is Helm an emacs thing I should look into if I want autocomplete? Trying to stay pretty vanilla but I'm already wishing for that feature.

You might be interested in company-mode [1].

[1] https://company-mode.github.io/

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

#162

Post by com2kid »

donatj wrote: post #38

Rhino 3D allows you to type in anything you can do with the mouse. You just start typing, no shortcut first. It's feels like a beautiful marriage of powerful command line app and equally powerful and pretty UI. I've been using it regularly since around 2002 and this functionality has always been core to its being. It makes discoverability hugely simple, just start typing what I want to do. I've always wondered why mo…

Rhino 3D is my favorite piece of software. I used to use it for hours a day, and it felt like a natural extension of my mind. It was truly a perfect merger of UI and command line.

People keep on telling me how amazing Blender or SketchUp is, and they just can't understand that the perfect 3D modeling program with the perfect UI already exists, and has existed for over 20 years now.

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

#163

Post by photojosh »

Cerium wrote: post #154
imgabe wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I used to know an AutoCAD pro and watching him work was magic. He hardly ever touched the mouse and could type house plans about as fast as I could follow along. It seemed that a great knowledge of the commands combined with some mental math and an uncanny memory for multiples of 12 and 16 worked wonders.

As someone who only has an uncanny memory for the powers of 2... what's important about 12 and 16 in house drafting?

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

#164

Post by Cerium »

photojosh wrote: post #163
Cerium wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to know an AutoCAD pro and watching him work was magic. He hardly ever touched the mouse and could type house plans about as fast as I could follow along. It seemed that a great knowledge of the commands combined with some mental math and an uncanny memory for multiples of 12 and 16 worked wonders.

As someone who only has an uncanny memory for the powers of 2... what's important about 12 and 16 in house drafting?

Houses built with wood will place the wood at regular intervals. Walls are usually built with the boards at 16 inch intervals while floors are usually 12 inches and roofs may be 12 inch or 24 depending on loading conditions.

In order to be able to type a house you need to know the multiples of 12 and 16 up to about 30 or 50 x 12.

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

#165

Post by [deleted] »

photojosh wrote: post #163
Cerium wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to know an AutoCAD pro and watching him work was magic. He hardly ever touched the mouse and could type house plans about as fast as I could follow along. It seemed that a great knowledge of the commands combined with some mental math and an uncanny memory for multiples of 12 and 16 worked wonders.

As someone who only has an uncanny memory for the powers of 2... what's important about 12 and 16 in house drafting?

[deleted]

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

#166

Post by rg111 »

This could be TLDRd as-

- Before, there was the command line, where you had to type specific commands to get things done.

- That was complicated, and GUI made it simpler. First there was a small number of buttons.

- Then, GUIs fell prey to featurecreep, and included too much. Hence cometh the Command Palette where you can find anything.

I first felt the problem in my android Settings. After about 2017, there were simply too much stuff in Settings. I could not get anything done.

The search function really saved me there.

Now I use command palette wherever I can. In my Linux installed laptops- both at work and home- I get everything done through the palette.

I barely ever manually go to places.

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

#167

Post by joshspankit »

It’s mentioned in the comments but is worth highlighting.

Quicksilver was so far ahead of it’s time that I would say that Spotlight, Alfred, Mac’s Help search, and a whole boatload of Windows/Linux apps were a direct result of it.

If you get an opportunity, run an early version coded by Merlin in an old version of OSX

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

#169

Post by joshspankit »

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…

Not disappearance: elimination.

Almost genocide of.

I put this squarely on Apple.

They have continually sucked people in with promises then shut the door behind them, replacing those promises with restrictions and entrenching in to “the one true ecosystem”

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

#170

Post by joshspankit »

ineedasername wrote: post #51
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 not sure how related they are, but I noticed an inverse correlation with users have full access to their systems. As companies locked down systems, users had less opportunity to explore, learn, optimize (and also break or infect) their systems. Given solid UI design, the security tradeoff is probably worth it if the two are actually connected.

110%. You absolutely nailed a big part of it.

It’s like shipping entry level jobs to other countries: People lose the ability to learn and grow on the job. They lose the ability to work their way up. Instead you have to rely on an establishment that is hands-off.

It’s “study learning” vs actually doing the work.

Post reply on HN