191–200 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.
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 palett…
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Serious apps should come with event logs and command lines, period.
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.
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 lot of safety mechanisms to recover.
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…
There is the Shortcuts app for iOS and macOS now that replaces the old Automator app and provides a friendly GUI for some basic to more advanced automation and allows for AppleScript for more complex requirements. I don't know really how widespread its use is, but there are some passionate communities of people making and sharing shortcuts that does seem to extend beyond the "terminal ubergeeks" into more typical (al…
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…
- Jef Raskin
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.
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 agree. I've been learning MS Word for many years at the level of creating my own templates and styles, using macros, assigning my own shortcut keys to building blocks, and using snippets in conjunction with AHK. My documents look exactly like Latex files with SVG images and nice look, but with __so much__ less trouble. Anyone who thinks Word is not capable of typesetting excellent documents has not given it a shot.…
Powerpoint is often abused but it works well, and if you learn the shortcut keys for moving objects around it's actually very capable for making sketches and diagrams. Much easier to make a poster in powerpoint than word, actually because each slide is strictly one page and you don't have to fight margins.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 palett…
Tomorrows shells already exist: - murex https://murex.rocks - elvish https://elv.sh - fish
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The whole screen was mounted on a big button, so touching it was hovering and you'd press the screen with a satisfying click to execute something. It wasn't the most reliable if you weren't careful, but why not do that with a pressure sensor nowdays?
Also known as force touch on an iPhone.
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I like to have both. AutoCAD is an example of a (very) complex application which has both.
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…