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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

#141

Post by themodelplumber »

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.

Alfred was really cool. I replaced what I liked about Spotlight in Xubuntu by using combination of Guake, XFCE Whisker Menu Search Actions, and DE keyboard shortcuts bound to various scripts. Then I added some more stuff that I never knew I wanted from Spotlight.

I couldn't go back now, TBH, without using some kind of Mac OS native scripting components.

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

#142

Post by themodelplumber »

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.

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

#143

Post by arusahni »

clusterfish wrote: post #56
n3t wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ctrl+k → focus the search bar ctrl+l → focus the address bar

Why do people use a separate search bar, when typing the search query into the address bar works the same? Unless you're often searching for strings that look like URLs?

In addition to what gsich said, URLs you type don't get sent to your search engine for suggestion autocompletion.

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

#144

Post by gumby »

> one of the defining features of this decade’s software.

Seems a bit much. Typing commands never went away. And the population of Sublime users must be a negligible fraction of all software users.

I’d say things of the scale of machine learning have been more defining features of this decade’s software.

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

#145

Post by NateEag »

jdhn wrote: post #97
Xevi wrote: post #24

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. Yes you can. The generally agreed upon way to do this is by long pressing whatever you want to see a tooltip over.

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.

You put a line of text in the mobile UI that says "To see tooltips, press and hold on a button."

You can stop showing that line of text once they've shown a tooltip (or two, if you're worried about them triggering it accidentally and not knowing how they did it).

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

#146

Post by nstart »

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…

Is it just possible that the workflow of a power user has changed now while still retaining the core value of finding smart and efficient ways to get work done? Some examples that come to mind:

The productivity industry is huge. Pop into the YouTube rabbit hole of people demonstrating how to use tools to be more productive, and you’ll stumble into a community that is bending every tool to basically serve their personal approach to life. The effectiveness of that is debatable but these are people who are absolutely pushing apps to their edge. A lot of them are mobile tap-only people too. But they also satisfy the condition of learning lots of smart and efficient ways of using their tools.

Content creators. Especially younger ones. I’m floored by the kinds of videos younger people, aged 16-23, are making by pushing the limits of their mobile devices to create engaging content. And I’m not even talking about the ones who make use of multiple tools across both laptops and smart phones. I’m just thinking of the people who will combine a few apps with the native functionality of something like TikTok and they create high effort content that is representative of someone who has taken the time to learn smart and efficient ways to get their work done. Again, the value of the output can be debated all day. But I think it’s obvious how far people are pushing their tool sets.

There are probably other groups I don’t know of because of my bubble, but I do think the above groups show that power users are alive and well even if they look different than they did in the past.

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

#147

Post by NateEag »

tra3 wrote: post #94
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…

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.

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

#148

Post by p2t2p »

codr7 wrote: post #117
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…

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

Correction: Event logs should be transaction logs instead and you must be able to travel through it reverting and re-applying actions. It should be branch-able and allow you to jump between those branches.

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

#149

Post by kitsunesoba »

karaterobot wrote: post #18
blondin wrote: post #8

> "People need to feel that they can try things without damaging the system," recommended Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. well, for what it's worth, many modern apps aren't following that guideline. for a long time i have questioned the disappearance of tooltips in user interfaces. especially when everybody seems to come up with their own iconography nowadays. the answer i got from UX people is that "you can't ho…

> 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!

Rule of the lowest common denominator, whether it be by way of trying to accommodate multiple form factors or multiple operating systems is certainly one of the biggest drivers of the decline of truly excellent software. One size fits all is never going to fit anybody even half as well as something more tailored to a specific subset.

I would like to see someone try the opposite, where when possible gaps in functionality on one platform or form factor are filled in, so all users’ experiences are elevated by the most capable target rather than dragged down by the least capable. That will probably never happen though.

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

#150

Post by bluedino »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #119
tambourine_man wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember as a young IT technician, getting chewed out by a CEO because his assistant sent a PowerPoint at the very last minute that used a font only she had on her computer, and it was played at a quarterly meeting and looked odd.
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