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

261–270 of 279 posts

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

#261

Post by p2t2p »

thrower123 wrote: post #231
p2t2p wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an interesting perspective. May I ask you what is you professional use of a computer and if it is programming - what kind of programming? I’m asking because I’m curious if environment drives habits/preferences.

I'm a Windows programmer, and I'm old enough to remember when UX was something people took seriously.

I expected something like that. Don't get me wrong, not in a bad way in "I know where you're coming from way". I personally don't care for icons, I like "the Apple way" - a menu with a search. A perfect Windows UI for me would be no icon panels, just a menu in a window and some shortcut to search through it and also each menu item would've a keyboard shortcut typed next to it.

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

#262

Post by ashton314 »

themodelplumber wrote: post #142
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.

Helm is a huge package. If you want something that stays closer to a vanilla experience, check out Daniel Mendler’s Vertico package: https://github.com/minad/vertico

He’s got a bunch of other really nice lightweight packages that leverage built-in completion mechanisms. See also https://github.com/minad/vertico#complementary-packages

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

#263

Post by ashton314 »

sidpatil wrote: post #161
themodelplumber wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You might be interested in company-mode [1]. [1] https://company-mode.github.io/

Company handles completion-at-point stuff. I think the op might be asking about a command completion framework.

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

#264

Post by codr7 »

xmprt wrote: post #157
codr7 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 implies that the application is made up of commands, which leads to a healthy separation of concerns.

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

#265

Post by tehnub »

olifante wrote: post #236
tehnub wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d guess that most people don’t use keyboard shortcuts at all, and only very few use anything besides copy, paste, and maybe save. People are shocked when I “command+l, c, t, v, enter” to duplicate the current tab.

No need for copy-pasting, just doing "Command+L, Command+Return" will duplicate your current tab. Works on Chrome and Safari.

Wow! Thanks for the tip. Never knew that.

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

#266

Post by behnamoh »

johnwalkr wrote: post #197
behnamoh wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

The problem with word is that it doesn't guide the user to use it well, and few users are trained properly. I wish there was some kind of strict mode where only styles can be used (and maybe even locked), and nobody could tweak formatting manually all over the place. Templates also aren't widely used well, so most company documents end up containing all kids of styles and formatting built up from years of copy-pastin…

Yeah I make many diagrams and graphs using PowerPoint and often people think it's made by some professional illustration software. And I use PowerPoint for my presentations too. Still, I wish it were possible to have some features of Beamer in PP. Also, it's a shame that drawing a simple x-axis with ticks on it is still very time consuming on PP.

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

#267

Post by NateEag »

tra3 wrote: post #254
NateEag wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right? I've been emacsing for a couple of years now but I haven't reached the critical mass yet; where I can sit down and just code something up like this. Anyway, M-x-helm is pretty critical to my workflow; half forgotten (or guessed) commands work pretty dang well when you can complete them.

I moved from Helm to Ivy a while back, but yeah. Booting into vanilla Emacs is almost a foreign country to me now.

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

#269

Post by Sophira »

skinkestek wrote: post #223
linspace wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can do that with Emacs. What other tools make it easy to branch in history?

For small values of easy: vim. (It is really easy to do I think, doing it correctly instead of just being clumsy and hitting some key that starts it, that is the challenge ;-) I only learned now that emacs could do it.

I didn't know that vim could do this! I've always assumed that undo/redo (u/^r) were my only options.

For anyone else who didn't know, try ":help undo-branches" or take a look at https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Using_undo_branches , which has a simple example of use.

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

#270

Post by Sophira »

renox wrote: post #229
linspace wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surprisingly, git seems quite humane, even when you screw things up it gives you a lot of safety mechanisms to recover. 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

A copy of the repo really? I just check in everything in a new commit then write the SHA1 somewhere.

The point of taking a copy of the repo is that you don't have to use git itself to get back to a known state, which is important when it's a tool that you're experimenting with and you're not sure on its use.

There's also a psychological element to it. If you can verify for yourself that the repo can't possibly contain anything that would mess you up after an earlier mistake, it's much easier to do things than if you have to worry about using the wrong branch name when you don't know how to delete branches, for example.

Post reply on HN