181–190 of 279 posts
The article paints command palettes as a return to terminal inputs. However there are two massive differences. Firstly, the use of fuzzy search and natural language makes the commands discoverable. Secondly, there is a feedback mechanism that shows what the command will do before it's run. Together, these massively lower the learning curve.
Is love to see a command palette terminal fusion. Thought about this many times.
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.
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…
But of course the shortcut to jump to the search area is completely undiscoverable, as are many macOS features. You can see it if you go to preferences -> keyboard -> shortcuts -> app shortcuts. (And you can also reconfigure the shortcut key, or reconfigure any shortcut in any app. That feature I love)
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.
I love Alfreds custom workflows. Half the time I’m using it the same way I’d use Spotlight, but I’m also using it to trigger custom workflows constantly. (Which often just call out to CLI utils or run zsh/Apple/Swift scripts, integrations that Alfred makes easy)
I also appreciate its global hot key support. For example, I’ve setup the F14/F15 keys to adjust brightness on an external monitor. (Just by having a workflow call out to `ddctl`)
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…
Smartphones are truly impressive tech devices. There are people around the globe running businesses/houses/hobbies with nothing but a smartphone. On the other hand, “code” has never been more accessible and powerful.
I feel like the disappearance of the “power user” is not like this of the middle class in our western society. Maybe they turned into “power doers”.
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…
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 don’t think that’s true at all – consider the surge in popularity of no-code tools these days. What would you call somebody using Zapier to hook two completely different systems up to talk to one another, if not a power user?
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…
Of course it was a little harder (but not that much) to master the tools of this era but once you understood the basic paradigms (files, folders, windows, menus, toolbars, common discoverability, common keyboard shortcuts, F1 for help…) you could become proficient in any unknown software way more faster than today.
Now, there is nearly no transferable knowledge between 2 softwares. For me this looks like « knowledge lock-in » (which adds to the vendor and data lock-in, btw).
Well, we still have Linux if we want to learn something useful. But even there if you use it professionally, you’re probably going to be stuck with all those « I’m unique » Electron apps.
tbf, I think what we are missing is a truly high quality multi platform GUI toolkit able to work with modern language. Most are still only officially supporting C++ and nobody wants to write a complex application in C++ anymore.
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 don't know if they've disappeared -- maybe the numbers are diminished, but they still exist. Take something like Tableau for instance. If you visit the Tableau forums, there's some really creative people who are constantly coming up with solutions for dashboard problems, anything from rewriting a SQL query to workarounds with Excel, just to get a dashboard to display the right way. Some of these solutions involve a…
Interesting you say that in a comment thread about an article that mentions several times how macOS and a couple bits of software designed for it helped popularise the command palette (which is a power user-friendly tool). Apple’s OSes have always have advanced features for power users, from the Apple Script of all to Automator and Shortcuts, and all the places where Spotlight is used. MacOS is for noobs is quite far from the truth. Sure, it can be used by noobs, but it does not mean it is restricted to them.
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 always writing one-off scripts to get a repetitive job done.
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…
Worth pointing out that Helm was a fork of anything.el, and I’m pretty sure stuff like Icicles predates even that by as much as a decade, so 2011 is underselling Emacs a bit here.