> I'm also surprised that the Awesomebar-/Sublime Text-/VSCode-style command palette hasn't by now become a ubiquitous feature of user interfaces. This makes m

> I'm also surprised that the Awesomebar-/Sublime Text-/VSCode-style command palette hasn't by now become a ubiquitous feature of user interfaces. This makes me think of programs on the Mac[1] like Alfred and LaunchBar. While they're usually called "application launchers," in a lot of ways they're more like simple, always-available command lines. I use Alfred for launching nearly every program, but also use it to do various web searches (like "g foobar" for Google[2], "wp foobar" for Wikipedia, etc.), perform simple calculations ("=123+(45/67)"), and even actions like converting Markdown on the clipboard to BBCode or creating Jira URLs for pasting into GitHub PRs. The Mac's native Spotlight has evolved to do some of these tasks, but Alfred, Launchbar, et. al. are more powerful in part because they're more explicit -- Spotlight makes educated guesses about what you're searching for, but Alfred operates more like, well, a command line. [1] I presume programs like these exist for Linux, too, although I haven't found any when I've gone looking. The lack of one would actually be a pretty major stumbling block for me for platform switching. (As would the lack of anything quite like Keyboard Maestro, but that's a different topic, and maybe that's out there, too!) [2] Actually I'm using DuckDuckGo but still type "g <thing>" because of years of muscle memory.