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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

#91

Post by not_math »

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…

From my experience, apps are not developed anymore with power user in mind.

There use to be a terminal app (DOS) at a company I worked at which only worked with shortcuts, the learning curve was pretty steep but after a while using it you could be pretty efficient.

Now they replaced it with a nice UI but you don't have shortcuts. Maybe there wasn't enough demand for it.

In programming we mostly use tools we also use at home or elsewhere, so the learning cost is worth it (if I learn VIM, I will be more efficient at every programming job in the future, not just this one)

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

#92

Post by kymaz »

tshaddox wrote: post #40
karaterobot wrote: post #18

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. Achieving uniformity by reducing the user experience to the platforms' lowest common denominator. Not the best solution!

It actually doesn’t seem like that bad of an idea to me, at least under the assumption that you’re not going to maintain an entirely separate UI for the mobile and desktop apps (which would be ideal, but is incredibly expensive and tends to result in broken and missing features on one or both platforms even for companies with enormous budgets). I would argue that “reducing to the lowest common denominator” actually i…

It's a terrible idea to me! Like sure, I know the devs want to do the minimum of work, but that doesn't make it a good idea to take the easy way out.

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

#93

Post by metaphor »

userbinator wrote: post #7
thrower123 wrote: post #2

I hate this trend. Give me back menus and toolbars. I avoid using VS Code for this reason.

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 is simply unavoidable in any sensible CAD, which makes constantly having to release the mouse to type the next command, or F3/F9 to toggle object/grid snaps (especially with shit modern keyboards without standard F-key separation e.g. MX Keys) admittedly annoying. I contrast this UX to SolidWorks which is overwhelmingly mouse+toolbar in a way that's comparatively trivial to navigate, or Altium which is driven by single hotkey sequencing that allows the other hand to stay fixed on mouse.

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

#94

Post by tra3 »

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.

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

#95

Post by jdhn »

gabrielsroka wrote: post #49
tshaddox wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not aware of anyone agreeing to that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mobile UI that shows tooltips when you long press on a button.

That's the standard on Android, especially for the built-in apps. https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/tooltips

I think it's kind of funny how Google is using this as an example when their own Gmail app in iOS has the "Write a new email" action as a floating action button with a pencil and the word "Compose".

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

#96

Post by KennedyHere »

Something I'm not seeing in this discussion is that commands entered via keyboard are typically in English or an English mnemonic. That excludes most of the world's population. Are there command line style interfaces that are commonly used but not English based?

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

#97

Post by jdhn »

Xevi wrote: post #24
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. 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.

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

#98

Post by selfhoster11 »

KennedyHere wrote: post #96

Something I'm not seeing in this discussion is that commands entered via keyboard are typically in English or an English mnemonic. That excludes most of the world's population. Are there command line style interfaces that are commonly used but not English based?

I don't think it excludes anyone. My native language has nothing to do with English, but I was pretty comfortable with an English-based set of keyboard shortcuts. It's just something to memorize, and that's it.

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

#99

Post by kymaz »

ok_dad wrote: post #71
worldsayshi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? Did you long press on it?

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.

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

#100

Post by imgabe »

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 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 (AutoLisp, a lisp dialect). The command line was also a repl, so you could type snippets of code and execute them on your drawing and see the effects immediately, making it easy to experiment.

Revit has none of this. Everything is menu driven. There is a macro system, but you have to go hunting for it. There's also a way to build add-ons and extensions by downloading an SDK and learning C++ or C#, but that's not really the same as making a quick script to automate some repetitive task. There's no command line. Even the newer versions of AutoCAD hide the command line in the default configuration. If you don't know to go looking for it, you'll never find it.

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