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

131–140 of 279 posts

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

#131

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

austinjp wrote: post #87
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.

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…

That particular one is cmd-? So it’s pretty darn mnemonic. Pretty sure it’s also spelled out in the search bar of the Help menu bar item.

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

#132

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

kymaz wrote: post #112
wildrhythms wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Cmd-, opens spotlight preferences while spotlight is open

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

#133

Post by Gracana »

noisem4ker wrote: post #84
dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of those tiny seemingly inconsequential things that keeps me hooked on Mac OS

KDE also does it: https://pointieststick.com/2021/05/21/this-week-in-kde-kcomm...

That's very nice. I really ought to make the switch to KDE, at least for a while to see what else I might be missing.

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

#134

Post by karaterobot »

tshaddox wrote: post #40
karaterobot wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the answer i got from UX people is that "you can't hover or have tooltips on mobile". they are trying to achieve uniformity between mobile and desktop. Achieving uniformity by reducing the user experience to the platforms' lowest common denominator. Not the best solution!

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…

> It certainly isn’t a great solution to create a UI that is impossible to understand without tooltips and ship that UI to mobile devices without the tooltips!

Right, so don't do that. But, desktop and mobile are different platforms with different input devices, and designers should make use of both to create the best experience for users. There are certainly tradeoffs in terms of cost to implement versus value for users, and if the argument is "it will simply cost us too much money to implement tooltips" then I suppose that's up to the product manager or equivalent. But, "we can't have tooltips on desktop because the mobile version doesn't support them" is a non sequitor. If a UX person gave that as a reason, I'd have some questions for them.

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

#135

Post by Jach »

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

As the siblings mention it doesn't really apply here because the choices aren't one-shot, you aren't stuck with one, you have time to consider, choices can differ a lot, etc.

But really any supposed psychological phenomenon should be looked at skeptically absent overwhelming evidence like IQ or the Big 5 personality traits. Here are three links on "choice overload":

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/48210291_Can_There_... 2010 meta-analysis, "we found a mean effect size of virtually zero but considerable variance between studies"

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8426193 2018, "...where they could compare them one another anytime with relatively low cognitive load, the choice overload did not occur (Experiment 1). ... where participants had to compare them based on memory representations with relatively high cognitive load, the choice overload did occur (Experiment 2). These results suggest that the choice overload is actually replicable when cognitive load is sufficiently boosted."

http://psychbrief.com/choice-paradox/ Nice overview of some actual studies and the underlying experiments, as well as common flaws in the mathematical methods used for analysis that apply to many psychology studies.

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

#137

Post by smcleod »

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'd agree with this, over the years it's felt like the answer to giving more power or customisation has gone backwards to "we have an API" and "you need to learn a python / whatever language for this".

I would say that we're continuing to move away from interfacing with computers as humans (with near natural language scripting, power TUI/UIs etc...) - to interfacing with computer as computers (writing code, digesting APIs etc....).

I'm not saying it's a bad thing - but it's certainly something I've noticed and it does seem to cause a lot of NIH and reinventing the wheel.

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

#138

Post by ziml77 »

jdhn wrote: post #95
gabrielsroka wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the standard on Android, especially for the built-in apps. https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/tooltips

I think it's kind of funny how Google is using this as an example when their own Gmail app in iOS has the "Write a new email" action as a floating action button with a pencil and the word "Compose".

I wish they labeled all the major FABs. It took me ages to figure out how to make a new spreadsheet in Google Sheets on the desktop after they switched to a mobile-first UI. That Google-logo-colored "+" button in the lower right is not easy to see. If it had text next to it I'm sure it would have been harder to overlook.

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

#139

Post by Drew_ »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #122
jdhn wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this is how you indicate to users that tooltips exist via the long press action. I personally never knew that long press to show a tooltip was the "generally agreed upon way" to show tooltips, and it would be a lot simpler to just have a button label.

How do you indicate to users that they can right-click on a computer mouse? You don't; they just know it. If they don't, their friends and family will teach them.

It's pretty undesirable to hide functionality behind invisible gestures or menus specifically because users do not "just know it".
Post reply on HN