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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

#251

Post by ineedasername »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #216
ineedasername wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> As companies locked down systems, users had less opportunity to explore, learn, optimize (and also break or infect) their systems. With power comes great responsibility; I'm confident it was a tradeoff, because for every one competent and savvy user, there were ten that would have to call IT every week with yet another virus or breakdown.

Generally agreed. Especially with ransomware these days I can only imagine how bad it would be if users had admin by default. I think the only reason we don't frequently see that attack vector now on home computers is because they aren't lucrative targets. If many/most corporate PC's were an effective vector into the rest of the systems because they had admin, it would truly be a nightmare. In the past when admin was common viruses were either just to cause a bit of chaos or exfiltrate data. Both bad, but now their is a direct financial incentive to shutdown the entire company.

That said, where I work there is a special path to admin if you have an actual need for it. It requires a security training course and special approval from a supervisor and the whoever leads technology in your division. And also signing a disclaimer that you now take full responsibility for any & all things that might possibly go wrong with your system due to use of admin privileges and all the consequences that entails, including "disciplinary actions" (screw up bad and you'll get fired). Makes one a bit more paranoid about security, which is healthy. I just wish the training & approval process included the education & tools needed to spin up your own VM's. It's not hard and the tools are free and (for anyone who really needs admin) relatively user friendly.

Otherwise things are very locked down. IT would much rather have you reboot than grant access to taskmanager to kill your own user processes.

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

#252

Post by michlim »

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…

Perhaps it is a learning curve problem? In a world where user manuals and UIs are friendlier than man pages, the increase in "smartphone tap-only users" will definitely be faster than the increase in "vim/terminal ubergeeks."

This is sad because terminals are powerful tools that are fast, composable, and programmable.

What we need is for terminals to provide easier hooks to help people become "vim/terminal ubergeeks". Use a command repeatedly? Help the user set up their first alias. Need to use an advanced sed command? Help the user form their first sed and then slowly take off the training wheels. Programmers really do want to learn to become power users. Terminal UI needs to evolve to help them.

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

#253

Post by kevincox »

These command palettes are fantastic *if you know what you are looking for*. The reason is that the results page is ephemeral. I see many websites copying this type of design but using it for searching documents where it is far less clear which I want just based on the title. I end up having to redo my search, scroll to where I was, and try the next candidate over and over again.

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

#254

Post by tra3 »

NateEag wrote: post #147
tra3 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I’m surprised nobody mentioned emacs. The only thing missing is auto complete not just on command names but the descriptions also.

I was just thinking that someone should really implement this via extension. Then I thought "...assuming it isn't already built in somewhere." Looks like it's `apropos-documentation`: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ap... Can't be too hard to hook that up to one of the auto-complete M-x replacements. Someday I'll read that while manual. Someday.

Right? I've been emacsing for a couple of years now but I haven't reached the critical mass yet; where I can sit down and just code something up like this.

Anyway, M-x-helm is pretty critical to my workflow; half forgotten (or guessed) commands work pretty dang well when you can complete them.

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

#255

Post by cxr »

yourapostasy wrote: post #235
voidfunc wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Killed by design. Companies that build products or services hate power users because they limit the ability to sell customizations or pro service engagements. Software is now designed to be hard to manipulate outside of the expected workflows unless you are willing to pay for a software engineer or three (either internally or via aforementioned PS) to figure out.

> ...hate power users because they limit the ability to sell customizations or pro service engagements. Never ascribe to malice... Having sat on the product side before with some of my clients, I can describe it from their point of view. Power users typically consume a disproportionate share of support engineering and development engineering hours per account compared to their normal user calls from an accounting per…

> Never ascribe to malice, that which is adequately explained by incentive structuring.

Incentives sounds exactly like what the person you're responding to described. Malice, on the other hand, doesn't show up at all in what they wrote.

It seems weird to introduce some element to the discussion yourself, and then work so hard to explain why an explanation that depends on that element is the wrong answer. It amounts to a sort of elaborate and roundabout strawman.

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

#256

Post by ascagnel_ »

p2t2p wrote: post #193
xmprt wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like from a design and architecture point of view, building an application with the command line as a first class citizen will ensure that the application is well designed.

Have you ever run `rm -f important_doc.txt` instead of intended `rm -f important_doc copy.txt`? It doesn't matter if it is GUI or terminal interface, software must be _humane_, forgive mistakes and provide a way out. As much as love Unix coreutils and have them in may fingertips, those are the least humane programs I have ever used. Surprisingly, git seems quite humane, even when you screw things up it gives you a lo…

I totally agree, as long as that interface gives users knowledge as to how it forgives the user.

I use a Mac for work, and one of the first things I did was to alias `rm` to the utility `trash`[0] -- instead of immediately marking the bytes as free like `rm` does, it'll move the file(s) to the system's trash can.

[0]: https://hasseg.org/trash/

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

#257

Post by wenc »

kergonath wrote: post #188
wenc wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you look outside of the consumer macOS ecosystem, you'll find that power users are alive and well. 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…

I agree with all your points. I think your last point about macOS not just being for noobs is true. I don’t think I implied anything in my comment contrary to it.

I do think that despite macOS having these power user tools, their uptake in modern times seems more limited compared to the olden times (System 7-9) and when compared to other platforms. I know I was excited when Automator came out in OS X Tiger but I don’t know anyone who’s really used it outside of folks who publish their workflows.

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

#258

Post by wodenokoto »

jakear wrote: post #61
wodenokoto wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the best features of OSX is that programs have menu bars. I didn't even know they had removed the menus from VS Code on other platforms. I still can't find anything in word, except on mac, where there is an actual menu. Anyway, the removing of menus was not caused by the addition of command palettes. I think the history is that microsoft believed icons was easier than text, so they made the ribbons, and then f…

VS code has menus on all platforms. All platforms also provide native menus. (Work on VSCode)

Parent said menus were gone and I just did a quick search for screen shots and saw one from windows without top menu and assumed parent to be correct.

Thanks for clarifying.

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

#259

Post by bmn__ »

pjerem wrote: post #187
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…

This have been discussed here but there was a time (Windows 9x/XP area) where GUIs were « intuitive but with some learning curve ». 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…

Using French punctuation in English prose is jarring to read.

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

#260

Post by kragen »

jodrellblank wrote: post #172

I could have sworn I saw a dropdown command/search dialog designed by Jeff Raskin as part of The Humane Interface, and demonstrated in PyTHE a Python imeplementation of it. Can't find any evidence of it, but I can find a 2003 Guido van Rossum review of Jeff Raskin's book "The Humane Interface" in which Raskin mentions LEAP(r) a design for adding search-backwards and search-forwards keys below the spacebar to save peo…

Right, The Humane Environment, following on his work with the Canon Cat and the Macintosh, before Steve Jobs took over the project and made it into a better Lisa. Later they renamed THE to the more googlable "Archy", a pun on RCHI, the Raskin Center for the Humane Interface, shortly before Jef's surprising death from pancreatic cancer. Jef's son Aza unfortunately hasn't kept Jef's stuff online, and he also invented infinite scroll websites. Nice guy though.

LEAP was Emacs incremental-search, but on the Cat the idea was to use it to replace all cursor movement except "creep" left and right arrows.

Thanks for the video! I had never seen it. YT suggested https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jErqdRE5zpQ, another Cat video. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XZomNp9TyPY shows a brief clip of the Forth interpreter.

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