201–210 of 279 posts
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.
On Windows, you could press ALT to navigate the menu bar: each menu item would have a letter underlined to tell you how to select it, and when you picked a letter the menu would expand and each new item would have an underlined item etc. So you quickly discover and commit to muscle memory that ALT + F + S would select File then Save. This worked for dialog pop-up options as well so you didn't have to click. You can't…
The solution was in the switch to Ribbons: the underlines were replaced with keytips that are displayed when you hit Alt and as such aren’t required to be a character in the command’s name.
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…
Are "power users" disappearing, or are they just being ignored? Software (and online services) has been in a race to the bottom for over a decade.
I believe they are mostly ignored.
A power user is a user, who doesn't fear the technical outcall. (S)he wants to get work done and uses a computer as a serious, professional tool. Sooner or later this will require this kind of user to step into configuration, the command line, etc. These users will accumulate IT knowledge auto-didactically, by visiting forums, mailing-lists, etc.
However, they come from many different positions and professions. And as such, they are a moving target of many, often highly specialized, communities. Not the typical customer base a large corporation wants. The large corporation will delegate such communities to "consultants", which those communities either can, or can not afford. I am not an archaeologist, but I could imagine, that archaeologists may benefit from tablets, that can do photos on-site and a document format, that let's them keep track of their excavations, link those to relevant data, etc. Photos like this [1] clearly show a pattern, that relies on coordinates. However, I guess, they are notoriously underfunded and nobody cares anyway.
> Software (and online services) has been in a race to the bottom for over a decade.
I wholeheartedly agree.
I remember the times of ActiveScripting on Windows. It was a great (and much needed) idea, that, however, has been positioned at system admins only (the most typical power user in a Windows environment, typically just some secretary or coworker, who is ready to do it, than a full position) and thus never really took off. Same for XML. Just because software-engineers don't like the format, it must not mean, that there is not some people being "document-engineers". Not everybody, who wants to use a computer programmatically, works at a Web/Cloud startup, etc.
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Virginia-Butler/publica...
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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.
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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…
You have to earn it. I admit that when I started using git sometimes I made a copy of the repo just in case I ended in a state that made it easier to nuke it and start again
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.
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Most of the keyboard shortcuts for a particular application are right next to the menu item. The command palette I’m talking about is clearly visible in the help menu: my theory is that people no longer browse the menus of a new application the way I would back in the NT 4.0 days. The system-wide shortcuts are a bit less discoverable but, they’re there if you know where to look: either search “keyboard shortcuts” in…
Thanks for this, I'll be sure to check out the keyboard preferences next time. I was referring to the "command-shift-/" key combo you mentioned when asking how to discover things in Mac OS, since it really feels that power-user functionality is hidden. I'm not exactly a Windows fan, but (generally speaking) in a standard windowed program, just hitting alt focuses the menu. Windows is almost entirely navigable by keyb…
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That’s great for Ubuntu!
Except they dropped the feature when they switched to GNOME 3 in 2017.
I've tried it, but it doesn't work in most of the apps I use like LibreOffice, Firefox, Double Commander.
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Tomorrows shells already exist: - murex https://murex.rocks - elvish https://elv.sh - fish
Tomorrow's shells would require changes to various command-line tools and possibly even the kernel. Just changing the shell executable is fundamentally limited, so it cannot be more than the first step. But thanks for the links anyway!
