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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

#171

Post by joshspankit »

tambourine_man wrote: post #60
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.

I think there's a strong correlation. We did gain a lot in security and simplicity with the App Store model. Lots of people that would never install apps on Windows or Macs, due to fear and ignorance, do so regularly on their smartphones. Moreover, they upgrade their OSs and pay with credit cards, etc. On the other hand, those same people had folders on their desktops and managed files reasonably well. And now that e…

I don’t want to assume ages, so: there was a time way before the app store where installing an app on a mac was as easy as clicking download and extracting the “file” (it was actually a folder, just like current mac apps). Trying it out only needed a double-clicking on the resulting icon.

No install script, no pkg files, no hidden prefs, nothing.

Want to uninstall it? Drag it to trash.

It was only when Apple started to be affected by mac piracy that they started down the road of restricting everything and when they started making real money selling their own content on their own platform (music then movies through iTunes) they hit the friggin gas.

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

#172

Post by jodrellblank »

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 people from arrow keys and mouse use, which is demonstrated on the CanonCat computer from 1987 in this[2] video on YouTube.

[1] https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=4790

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c

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

#173

Post by metaphor »

iamtedd wrote: post #106
metaphor wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cod(e/ium) requires Ctrl+Shift+P to actively engage its command palette. AutoCAD strikes me as a fundamentally different paradigm in that its command interface is "always active" so to speak, whereas menus/toolbars feel mostly like an optional overlay, at least to an experienced user. Although AutoCAD is my preferred tool when drafting electrical architectures and wiring diagrams, the mouse as primary human interface…

I've found AutoCAD can operate similar to how you describe Altium, in that pressing 'l' and enter gives you a line, typing 'str' gets you stretch, 'tr' gets you trim, shift-clicking with trim gets you the opposite of trim - extend. The command line has autocomplete. In this fashion, one hand operates the keyboard, and your other stays on the mouse. I quickly fell in love with this interface and immediately switched t…

AutoCAD is not like Altium in that the former requires either hitting Enter when the minimum command is entered, or more annoyingly, selecting from a slow-to-render autocomplete context menu with the mouse.

Some common commands can also be annoying when the required minimum characters don't cleanly map to a single hand, e.g. [E][X][P][L][Enter] to explode; or when they map to the other hand, e.g. [P][L][Enter] for polyline.

Altium's approach is literally single hotkey sequencing (i.e. no [Enter] after every command) which map directly to menus that underline each hotkey as a reminder, e.g. to [P]lace a [W]ire or [P]art in schematic capture, it's [P][W] or [P][P], respectively, while the menus change with ever key press. Yeah, your left hand is all over the keyboard, but every key press is a meaningful context switch.

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

#174

Post by wenc »

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 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 deep understanding of how to manipulate data (windowing functions, pivots, date arithmetic etc.).

And at most big companies, you'll find Excel wizards who do wonderful (but cryptic) things with VBA macros. You'll find full mathematical models embedded as Excel VBA macros. Maintainability aside, you can do some pretty mind-bending things with VBA.

There are also the AutoHotkey users who automate GUI tasks by recording mouse/keystrokes and then tweaking them. We had more than a few of those in my last company (bigcorp).

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

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

#175

Post by killjoywashere »

Cerium wrote: post #164
photojosh wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, angles in degrees lean heavily on 2, 3, and 5, and 12 can frequently be found lurking in that crowd and serves as a useful signpost in that way.

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

#176

Post by killjoywashere »

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #79
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…

It's also because while the number of programmers and basic users (smartphone tappers) have increased, the number of power users has not. People who would have been power users are pushed into programming due to demand.

power user as an intermediate state. Do they represent a lower activation energy or a hard-to-prevent adduct that occasionally gets all the way across?

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

#177

Post by hunter2_ »

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…

Conversational interfaces, i.e., chat bots including Google Assistant, take this approach but eliminate the pre-submit feedback that is so handy if you're at a keyboard.

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

#178

Post by moring »

underwater wrote: post #12

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.

I think the differences are not fundamental, but that the terminal inputs / shells did not evolve as much as they could or should have. There have been discussions all over the world on the merits of command-line vs. GUI, but too little of how tomorrow's command-line can be better than today's command-line.

Things DID improve, e.g. tab-autocomplete evolved very well. But that's not enough, and editor's command palettes show that. I actually thought I'll give some more quick examples than discoverability, but then I realized that you could fill a whole document with them...

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

#179

Post by atoav »

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…

> Something I've been noticing lately is the disappearance of the “power user”.

What gives you this impression? I thought different software at art university (Unity game engine, Blender) during the last years. The spread between people who alt tab their way between programs and people who move the mouse as if it was some foreign object didn't change much since 15 years ago in my experience.

What might have changed is that people have different expectations in how easy/hard software should be to learn.

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

#180

Post by varenc »

joshspankit wrote: post #171
tambourine_man wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a strong correlation. We did gain a lot in security and simplicity with the App Store model. Lots of people that would never install apps on Windows or Macs, due to fear and ignorance, do so regularly on their smartphones. Moreover, they upgrade their OSs and pay with credit cards, etc. On the other hand, those same people had folders on their desktops and managed files reasonably well. And now that e…

I don’t want to assume ages, so: there was a time way before the app store where installing an app on a mac was as easy as clicking download and extracting the “file” (it was actually a folder, just like current mac apps). Trying it out only needed a double-clicking on the resulting icon. No install script, no pkg files, no hidden prefs, nothing. Want to uninstall it? Drag it to trash. It was only when Apple started…

That’s still how I install 95% of Mac apps? (.dmg) I don’t think the Mac App Store is even that popular. Rarely is an app exclusively there, though times might be changing. About 5% of things come as .pkg installers but usually in a situation where it makes sense.

Default macOS will still check for Apple’s seal of approval on software, but this is done by developers signing their distributed app.

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