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Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again

smarx007 5y ago
The art in the image editor on Macintosh is Combing the Hair by Hashiguchi Goyo, if you were wondering like me. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_1930-0910-0-1 https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_1930-0910-... P.S. Super annoying how the website intercepts my Ctrl+F.
thrower123 5y ago
I hate this trend. Give me back menus and toolbars. I avoid using VS Code for this reason.
- duped 5y ago
  VS Code has menus and toolbars
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  I like a good command line, but the whole search box thing is annoying me to no end because it not predictable. If I type three characters and press enter, it shouldn't matter if I wait 0.5 or 1.8 seconds before I press enter. But with this mechanic, it typically does. What is "set _rem_inder" one time is "_rem_ove all files" the next time.
- nawgz 5y ago
  The other day I used the Command Palette to symlink `code` as a command to open `vscode` without having to type `ln -s /path/to/vscode /usr/bin/vscode` which was quite nice because trying the symlink version gave me confusing errors. I am unsure the UX is there to help make that discoverable in a menu; you'd be so deep that it'd be behind multiple sub-nests at a minimum. Seems much better to have a flat search for this.
  - fragmede 5y ago
    For anybody else looking, that particular command is called Shell Command: Install 'code' command in PATH.
- JadeNB 5y ago
  > I hate this trend. Give me back menus and toolbars. Everyone has their own preferences; personally, every time I open Word, I am confused and disoriented and have no idea where to look for what I want. I think it's best for no-one to try to impose their UI preference on everyone, and for all of us just to use the software with which we find it easiest to interact.
  - thrower123 5y ago
    This is the way everyone not responsible for creating it has always viewed the Office Ribbon UI. Most cursed creation in software.
    - _dain_ 5y ago
      counterpoint: I'm an Excel power-user and I really like the ribbon UI. when you use the alt mode you can fly through it and opportunistically/incrementally learn the keyboard shortcuts.
      - CornCobs 5y ago
        Something that irks me a bit is that the UI (with it's animations) can't keep up with pressing keyboard shortcuts. For example in word to change font size you could just do Alt+h+fs+<number> but you can't just press it as a single chord, you kinda need to wait for the UI to focus on the correct fields to make sure you're at the correct place
    - copperx 5y ago
      I know UI is subjective, but when the Ribbon was introduced I thought it was the best UI idea I had ever seen. It made the Office apps interface much more discoverable and easy to use than without it. It's a shame that the Ribbon paradigm is patented.
  - BurningPenguin 5y ago
    I think LibreOffice did it quite well with the ability to change the UI layout.
- starkd 5y ago
  It's easier to type commands when you have to do it alot. It uses muscle memory rather than deplete your attention span. Might be difficult at first, but it's easier once you get used to it.
  - Const-me 5y ago
    For the use cases you’re talking about, I prefer keyboard shortcuts. No need to click search bar, or look at the search result list. One only needs to memorize, or setup, a keyboard shortcut like Ctrl+Shift+M, and with muscle memory it will consistently take well under 1 second. Search UX is slower, needs more clicks or key presses.
    - ok_dad 5y ago
      In vscode I press one set of keys and get fuzzy search access to every feature. I'd rather barely memorize the phrases to search with (several phrasing find the same settings for me) than to to memorize dozens of barely used hotkeys. Most of my day is scrolling through code and editing it occasionally, not doing actual commands from the menu or whatever. To each their own, however I can see how it would be annoying when they don't include a menu for anything for folks who prefer that.
- userbinator 5y ago
  I like to have both. AutoCAD is an example of a (very) complex application which has both.
  - metaphor 5y ago
    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.
    - iamtedd 5y ago
      I've found AutoCAD can operate similar to how you describe Altium, in that pressing 'l' and enter gives you a line, typing 'str' gets you stretch, 'tr' gets you trim, shift-clicking with trim gets you the opposite of trim - extend. The command line has autocomplete. In this fashion, one hand operates the keyboard, and your other stays on the mouse. I quickly fell in love with this interface and immediately switched to using the command line for the vast majority of functions.
      - metaphor 5y ago
        AutoCAD is not like Altium in that the former requires either hitting Enter when the minimum command is entered, or more annoyingly, selecting from a slow-to-render autocomplete context menu with the mouse. Some common commands can also be annoying when the required minimum characters don't cleanly map to a single hand, e.g. [E][X][P][L][Enter] to explode; or when they map to the other hand, e.g. [P][L][Enter] for polyline. Altium's approach is literally single hotkey sequencing (i.e. no [Enter] after every command) which map directly to menus that underline each hotkey as a reminder, e.g. to [P]lace a [W]ire or [P]art in schematic capture, it's [P][W] or [P][P], respectively, while the menus change with ever key press. Yeah, your left hand is all over the keyboard, but every key press is a meaningful context switch.
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  One of the best features of OSX is that programs have menu bars. I didn't even know they had removed the menus from VS Code on other platforms. I still can't find anything in word, except on mac, where there is an actual menu. Anyway, the removing of menus was not caused by the addition of command palettes. I think the history is that microsoft believed icons was easier than text, so they made the ribbons, and then for a while other removed menus in favor of ribbons, but then they realized ribbons sucks, so they removed those, and then there was nothing, maybe a hamburger menu if one of the UX's had done webdesign before.
  - jakear 5y ago
    VS code has menus on all platforms. All platforms also provide native menus. (Work on VSCode)
    - wodenokoto 5y ago
      Parent said menus were gone and I just did a quick search for screen shots and saw one from windows without top menu and assumed parent to be correct. Thanks for clarifying.
    - thrower123 5y ago
      The problem is that there is nothing in the menus
- underwater 5y ago
  These paradigms can be complementary. Menus and toolbars for when the user is browsing and they don't know what they want, command bars for when the user knows what they want but not how to get there, and shortcut keys for when they know what they want and how to get there.
- p2t2p 5y ago
  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.
  - thrower123 5y ago
    I'm a Windows programmer, and I'm old enough to remember when UX was something people took seriously.
    - p2t2p 5y ago
      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.
- still_grokking 5y ago
  Toolbars for the stuff you don't use frequently and therefore don't know the keyboard shortcuts, but still need those functions now and than. But menus? Nobody would need them if command palettes would have some discoverable hierarchic structure to them. That's the last missing part to make command palettes "perfect".
feep 5y ago
Such a well written article/history. I applaud the trend. Love it. More smart-type CLIish interfaces, please.
- maguay 5y ago
  author here, thank you!
  - dmortin 5y ago
    Emacs should also have been mentioned, because M-x is a simple command palette and it's there for 30-40 years or so.
    - maguay 5y ago
      Great point.
blondin 5y ago
> "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 hover or have tooltips on mobile". they are trying to achieve uniformity between mobile and desktop. they will probably confine that useful command palette to particular apps too. because you can't have a command palette on mobile either.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  I don't understand the relationship you are suggesting between tooltips and feeling that you can try things without damaging the system.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    It's harder to damage things if tooltips give you some idea of what's going to happen when you push a button.
  - worldsayshi 5y ago
    Either you have a tooltip explaining the function or you have to test it to understand what it does. But to test something you want to know it doesn't cause problems. I feel like this is some fundamental UX dimension here. Cost and risk of learning. How much time do I have to use to learn all the commands or find the right command and if I have to try it what is the risk of breaking something? Just as relevant in cli applications.
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      Another thing that helps is a predictable, reliable undo function. If the user believes that any action is easy to undo, unknown actions won't be so scary. Of course, this is sort of a chicken-and-egg problem, because other than ctrl-z in certain desktop environments (in which environments undo is not always either predictable or reliable), there is no well-known idiom for undo.
arusahni 5y ago
I'm okay with command palettes, but hate how they steal ctrl/cmd + k. I use that in Firefox to focus the search bar. If you implement such a shortcut, please make it configurable!
- godDLL 5y ago
  Wait, wasn't that Cmd-L?
  - n3t 5y ago
    ctrl+k → focus the search bar ctrl+l → focus the address bar
    - clusterfish 5y ago
      Why do people use a separate search bar, when typing the search query into the address bar works the same? Unless you're often searching for strings that look like URLs?
      - gsich 5y ago
        You don't lose your search query with a separate bar.
      - arusahni 5y ago
        In addition to what gsich said, URLs you type don't get sent to your search engine for suggestion autocompletion.
underwater 5y ago
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.
- godDLL 5y ago
  That's right. Did you see/use Fish as a shell? I'm having much fun scripting in the Fish language at the moment, and using the shell in interactive programs.
- firexcy 5y ago
  I'd like to add a third, pro-terminal point, that cli tools are inherently ready to be scripted, piped, executed in batch and in parallel, none of which are common in gui apps with or without command palattes.
- worldsayshi 5y ago
  Is love to see a command palette terminal fusion. Thought about this many times.
  - austinjp 5y ago
    Although I don't use it, I see plenty of positive feedback about fzf [0] and I'm sure I've seen palette-style tools built with it that enable command and options discovery. [0] https://github.com/junegunn/fzf https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
  - slightwinder 5y ago
    People do this already with fuzzy-finders. fzf or rofi to name some. See here for some usages: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/wiki/Related-projects https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/wiki/Related-projects
  - p2t2p 5y ago
    I use fzf as command autocomplete tool in my zsh. It is still not a command palette but gets pretty close.
fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
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.
- dkdbejwi383 5y ago
  This is one of those tiny seemingly inconsequential things that keeps me hooked on Mac OS
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    This was available on ubuntu unity in 2012.
    - barsonme 5y ago
      That’s great for Ubuntu!
      - alex_smart 5y ago
        Except they dropped the feature when they switched to GNOME 3 in 2017.
        duckmysick 5y ago
        There's Plotinus: https://github.com/p-e-w/plotinus https://github.com/p-e-w/plotinus I've tried it, but it doesn't work in most of the apps I use like LibreOffice, Firefox, Double Commander.
  - noisem4ker 5y ago
    KDE also does it: https://pointieststick.com/2021/05/21/this-week-in-kde-kcommandbar-delivers-ludicrous-mode-productivity/ https://pointieststick.com/2021/05/21/this-week-in-kde-kcomm...
    - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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wodenokoto 5y ago
I love the command palette in Sublime, but it doesn't cover every menu item, which seems weird. There are also, kinda 3 palettes: Goto symbol Goto Anything Command Palette
marcodiego 5y ago
Ubuntu had that with their Unity UI since at least 2012: https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yzdfLbKQy08/XMqOc0TkS0I/AAAAAAAAV80/oe6jGTCdAiwLQrk5cfI6e82TAyo2y6fFACLcBGAs/s1600/Screenshot%2Bfrom%2B2019-05-02%2B13-29-46.png https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1SSxfxI-2WQ/XMqNh1byhBI/AAAAAAAAV8s/uf3v9x3_mP806tPp-chXntSUNIuyD5f1gCLcBGAs/s1600/Screenshot%2Bfrom%2B2019-05-02%2B13-25-33.png https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oNj-HJIiWIc/XMqRaQZUjaI/AAAAAAAAV88/d0VgS8q3Yb8AFaJ-EOVtM2PAXf2jJlijgCLcBGAs/s1600/Screenshot%2Bfrom%2B2019-05-02%2B13-42-23.png
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  If you take your URLs out of code blocks they'll actually show up as links. https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yzdfLbKQy08/XMqOc0TkS0I/AAAAAAAAV80/oe6jGTCdAiwLQrk5cfI6e82TAyo2y6fFACLcBGAs/s1600/Screenshot%2Bfrom%2B2019-05-02%2B13-29-46.png https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yzdfLbKQy08/XMqOc0TkS0I/AAAAAAAAV... https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1SSxfxI-2WQ/XMqNh1byhBI/AAAAAAAAV8s/uf3v9x3_mP806tPp-chXntSUNIuyD5f1gCLcBGAs/s1600/Screenshot%2Bfrom%2B2019-05-02%2B13-25-33.png https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1SSxfxI-2WQ/XMqNh1byhBI/AAAAAAAAV... https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oNj-HJIiWIc/XMqRaQZUjaI/AAAAAAAAV88/d0VgS8q3Yb8AFaJ-EOVtM2PAXf2jJlijgCLcBGAs/s1600/Screenshot%2Bfrom%2B2019-05-02%2B13-42-23.png https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oNj-HJIiWIc/XMqRaQZUjaI/AAAAAAAAV...
crummy 5y ago
Reminds me of this tweet: https://twitter.com/Pentadact/status/1432428893269467137 https://twitter.com/Pentadact/status/1432428893269467137 > The convention of being able to search Settings menus feels like one of the only things that's got unambiguously Better about software UX in about a decade.
robertwt7 5y ago
I can't remember the last time I browse through the menu bar / tool bar / start menu in windows / apps list in apple. In vs code, i do command pallette, in iTerm i use fzf, in mac i use spotlight, in iphone i use spotlight to find apps, in windows i press start then start typing to search.. It is true, it is the norm! It's just super convenient
donatj 5y ago
Rhino 3D allows you to type in anything you can do with the mouse. You just start typing, no shortcut first. It's feels like a beautiful marriage of powerful command line app and equally powerful and pretty UI. I've been using it regularly since around 2002 and this functionality has always been core to its being. It makes discoverability hugely simple, just start typing what I want to do. I've always wondered why more tools haven't had similar functionality. I'm glad to see the growing population of command palletes some 20 years later.
- com2kid 5y ago
  Rhino 3D is my favorite piece of software. I used to use it for hours a day, and it felt like a natural extension of my mind. It was truly a perfect merger of UI and command line. People keep on telling me how amazing Blender or SketchUp is, and they just can't understand that the perfect 3D modeling program with the perfect UI already exists, and has existed for over 20 years now.
seanwilson 5y ago
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 do this on Mac? Why? I found this really jarring. I know on Mac you can press CTRL + F2 (add Fn key if you have one) to change the keyboard focus to the menus but it doesn't underline the letters that will work and you have to hit enter to open things so it's clunky. The command palette is nice for discovery of lesser used commands and when there's lots of them but it's less predictable what keys you need to press to fuzzy search to the command you know is there and it doesn't teach your fingers the shortest key combo to trigger it.
- miffy900 5y ago
  It is annoying, but CMD+? (help menu search) I think makes up for it. It's far more useful for when you're navigating an unfamiliar interface.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- rz2k 5y ago
  Especially in Excel, using the keyboard to do everything is vastly superior in Windows. However in MacOS `command-shift-/` (⌘?) immediately shifts focuses to the help menu where you can begin typing to navigate directly to any command that appears in an application's menus, without needing to know where the command is hierarchically organized. It's very fast, and seems to work everywhere. I have Karabiner-Elements configured to register ⌘? whenever I press and release the left control alone without using it as a modifier of any other key. The `to_if_alone` condition in Karabiner-Elements is one of my favorite ways to re-use all of the modifier keys to invoke special commands. It would be great if I could figure out how to do that in Windows.
  - 5y ago
tambourine_man 5y ago
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 the Vim/Terminal ubergeek with almost nothing in between. I remember being floored by bureau in the 90s that completely automated their Photoshop and QuarkXPress workflow with AppleScript just by hitting the record button (not a single line of code written), folder actions, smart file placement and similar tricks.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  I think that the fraction of users who are power users has gone down as the people who own a computing device has gone from "those willing to shell out the price of a used car" to "everybody"
- voidfunc 5y ago
  Killed by design. Companies that build products or services hate power users because they limit the ability to sell customizations or pro service engagements. Software is now designed to be hard to manipulate outside of the expected workflows unless you are willing to pay for a software engineer or three (either internally or via aforementioned PS) to figure out.
  - yourapostasy 5y ago
    > ...hate power users because they limit the ability to sell customizations or pro service engagements. Never ascribe to malice... Having sat on the product side before with some of my clients, I can describe it from their point of view. Power users typically consume a disproportionate share of support engineering and development engineering hours per account compared to their normal user calls from an accounting perspective. The holistic, value-adding way to approach this is to work more closely with the individual power users to find out what they are doing in detail for each of their industries, find commonalities, and push product capabilities in those directions. The reflexive accounting response is invariably "make the power users stop using support services so much". Engineering then gets asked, "how do we stop these kinds of questions?", and the holistic response is shut down because "that costs too much, I want another option". You can see where this is leading...the features power users leverage get sunset, and finance/accounting is happy when they become responsible for a KPI improvement. ...while ignoring that any of them would give their eye teeth for the kind of profit lock-in Excel delivers, and under their KPI regime, Excel power users would have been stillborn. Never ascribe to malice, that which is adequately explained by incentive structuring. BTW, I usually clarify with leadership what they envision in these situations in a behind-closed-doors meeting that doesn't challenge them. Most of them honestly do not want Excel-like lock-in via power users. They feel it is too fraught a road and that they can achieve lock-in in other ways. Fair enough, and my due diligence advising them is discharged (I might not agree, but there comes a time to help the organization put all its wood behind a single arrow).
jiehong 5y ago
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). But it does allow you to add a shortcut to a command you find on the fly, which is great. [0] https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm
- tra3 5y ago
  Yeah I’m surprised nobody mentioned emacs. The only thing missing is auto complete not just on command names but the descriptions also.
  - NateEag 5y ago
    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/Apropos.html 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.
    - tra3 5y ago
      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.
      - NateEag 5y ago
        I moved from Helm to Ivy a while back, but yeah. Booting into vanilla Emacs is almost a foreign country to me now.
tonglil 5y ago
The worst thing about this site is it hijacks ctrl-f. Don't do that.
- jrootabega 5y ago
  Yeah, I was going to comment that, like the article mentions, it seems I can search for anything...except for the text in the article.
bitwize 5y ago
M-x has entered the chat.
KennedyHere 5y ago
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?
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  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.
scop 5y ago
There really is something to be said about the Command Pallete and UX design as a whole. I started out using Sublime Text as that was the easiest out-of-the-gate editor. I then spent several years in a fully customized tmux + vim configuration. A lot of fun! But it got stale, and then I spent several years in Emacs. And then VSCode came along with a lot of conveniences, and thus I used that for a year or two. Now, almost a decade after teaching myself how to program and making a career out of it, I’m back to using a pretty bare bones Sublime environment. It does what I need and it does it fast. My inner quest to become The Poweruser has been replaced by a quaint appreciation of simplicity. Thanks Sublime! (though it should be said: I’ve always used Vim-bindings, the pinnacle, in all these apps)
- wildrhythms 5y ago
  I went through a series of phases just like you're describing, but I eventually settled on vim + COC as my "home" editor. The COC plugin has been a game changer for me; all of the conveniences of a language server without the bloat of a full-featured editor like VS Code. https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim
analog31 5y ago
The complexity of software has caught up with the GUI. Getting a generation of people to approach and use computers was great. But the GUI was never "intuitive" unless "intuitive" means that you can be trained to recognize a certain number of symbols. And that number is finite, when they're always changing. Here's how it struck me like a freight train: I was looking at some instructions for installing certain "drivers" for some technical hardware. The instructions for Windows computers was a series of color glossy screen shots, with circles and arrows, and a paragraph under each one. Of course they were particularly hard to follow because they hadn't been updated to the last revision of the OS. In contrast, the Linux instructions were: sudo apt install foo bar blah ... sudo add a line to this file ... And even instructions for Windows computers are adopting this strategy: Press Windows-R+cmd, enter these commands I love the crude palette consisting of pressing the Windows key and typing some gibberish into the search bar, like "device manager" or "bluetooth settings." Much better than trying to remember where those things are located. And incrementally improving the search function will keep making it better. I hope. This could be the backdoor route into natural language computing.
- Tagbert 5y ago
  I think that there will always be a dynamic balance between GUI interactions and command line interactions. Command line is efficient and good for applications and function that you use on a regular basis, but can be difficult with apps that you are new to or only use occasionally. A proper UI should be able to accommodate both the efficiency of familiarity and the discoverability for a novice.
- hunter2_ 5y ago
  Conversational interfaces, i.e., chat bots including Google Assistant, take this approach but eliminate the pre-submit feedback that is so handy if you're at a keyboard.
- pjerem 5y ago
  This have been discussed here but there was a time (Windows 9x/XP area) where GUIs were « intuitive but with some learning curve ». Of course it was a little harder (but not that much) to master the tools of this era but once you understood the basic paradigms (files, folders, windows, menus, toolbars, common discoverability, common keyboard shortcuts, F1 for help…) you could become proficient in any unknown software way more faster than today. Now, there is nearly no transferable knowledge between 2 softwares. For me this looks like « knowledge lock-in » (which adds to the vendor and data lock-in, btw). Well, we still have Linux if we want to learn something useful. But even there if you use it professionally, you’re probably going to be stuck with all those « I’m unique » Electron apps. tbf, I think what we are missing is a truly high quality multi platform GUI toolkit able to work with modern language. Most are still only officially supporting C++ and nobody wants to write a complex application in C++ anymore.
mikek 5y ago
A good article on how to build good Command Palettes: https://blog.superhuman.com/how-to-build-a-remarkable-command-palette/ https://blog.superhuman.com/how-to-build-a-remarkable-comman...
spurgu 5y ago
Why Does Someone Still Think it's a Good Idea to Type Like This? It makes titles horribly unreadable, being unable to decipher the subject and other grammatical details. Let's invoke cancel culture on this motherfucker!
lgrialn 5y ago
This is so fawning and… something like name-dropping.
freewizard 5y ago
Anyone notices pressing Cmd-F / Ctrl-F on this linked article pops up a website launcher in that page? It's so neat and I want that in my Quicksilver / Alfred!
- jessaustin 5y ago
  Very subtle irony...
gumby 5y ago
> one of the defining features of this decade’s software. Seems a bit much. Typing commands never went away. And the population of Sublime users must be a negligible fraction of all software users. I’d say things of the scale of machine learning have been more defining features of this decade’s software.
kordlessagain 5y ago
kordless@gmail.com~> The History of Command Palettes: How Typing Commands Became The Norm Again | Capiche description The most popular new interface element in business software lets you tell apps exactly what you want to do. created 2020-12-22T21:03:43Z AI is in a conversation about an interesting article, on a popular website. Be nice. explanation The command palette allows you to quickly enter keyboard commands for common software actions and functions.For casual use, command palettes greatly improve on file menus: the list of available operations is easily searchable and you don't have to remember which menu each operation appear. For more skilled users
rg111 5y ago
This could be TLDRd as- - Before, there was the command line, where you had to type specific commands to get things done. - That was complicated, and GUI made it simpler. First there was a small number of buttons. - Then, GUIs fell prey to featurecreep, and included too much. Hence cometh the Command Palette where you can find anything. I first felt the problem in my android Settings. After about 2017, there were simply too much stuff in Settings. I could not get anything done. The search function really saved me there. Now I use command palette wherever I can. In my Linux installed laptops- both at work and home- I get everything done through the palette. I barely ever manually go to places.
joshspankit 5y ago
It’s mentioned in the comments but is worth highlighting. Quicksilver was so far ahead of it’s time that I would say that Spotlight, Alfred, Mac’s Help search, and a whole boatload of Windows/Linux apps were a direct result of it. If you get an opportunity, run an early version coded by Merlin in an old version of OSX
- brumm 5y ago
  I love Quicksilver, it's an extension of my brain at this point. It's also still alive: https://github.com/quicksilver/Quicksilver https://github.com/quicksilver/Quicksilver
vjancik 5y ago
Autocomplete makes all the difference. Especially ones that also search the command description.
jodrellblank 5y ago
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 people from arrow keys and mouse use, which is demonstrated on the CanonCat computer from 1987 in this[2] video on YouTube. [1] https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=4790 https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=4790 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c
- randkyp 5y ago
  "A search is either incremental or excremental." - Jef Raskin
- mushiake 5y ago
  maybe Archy[1] you thinking about? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software)
- kragen 5y ago
  Right, The Humane Environment, following on his work with the Canon Cat and the Macintosh, before Steve Jobs took over the project and made it into a better Lisa. Later they renamed THE to the more googlable "Archy", a pun on RCHI, the Raskin Center for the Humane Interface, shortly before Jef's surprising death from pancreatic cancer. Jef's son Aza unfortunately hasn't kept Jef's stuff online, and he also invented infinite scroll websites. Nice guy though. LEAP was Emacs incremental-search, but on the Cat the idea was to use it to replace all cursor movement except "creep" left and right arrows. Thanks for the video! I had never seen it. YT suggested https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jErqdRE5zpQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jErqdRE5zpQ, another Cat video. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XZomNp9TyPY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XZomNp9TyPY shows a brief clip of the Forth interpreter.
Helmut10001 5y ago
The same idea applies to Keypirinha [1], a small tool to open Apps etc. on Windows by typing. E.g. hit ALT+Space, type F.. and it'll immediately suggest Firefox, based on your previous use patterns. No menus, no clicking, no mouse. Just awesome. [1]: https://keypirinha.com/ https://keypirinha.com/
- vort3 5y ago
  Finally some appreciation for my favourite thing. Once you go Keypirinha, there's no going back. First thing I install on any machine I use. Have you seen PackageControl?
  - Helmut10001 5y ago
    Nice, thanks! So far I use chocolatey [1]. It is good, although some apps tend to be outdated (I can live with that, for the moment, it is not that worse yet). Will definitely keep in my Package Control. [1]: https://chocolatey.org/ https://chocolatey.org/
    - Helmut10001 5y ago
      Apologies, I think you referred to Keypirinha-PackageControl [1]. Did no know this. Thanks! [1]: https://github.com/ueffel/Keypirinha-PackageControl https://github.com/ueffel/Keypirinha-PackageControl
kevincox 5y ago
These command palettes are fantastic *if you know what you are looking for*. The reason is that the results page is ephemeral. I see many websites copying this type of design but using it for searching documents where it is far less clear which I want just based on the title. I end up having to redo my search, scroll to where I was, and try the next candidate over and over again.

The art in the image editor on Macintosh is Combing the Hair by Hashiguchi Goyo, if you were wondering like me. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_1930-0910-0-1 https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_1930-0910-... P.S. Super annoying how the website intercepts my Ctrl+F.

thrower123 5y ago

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

duped 5y ago
VS Code has menus and toolbars
marginalia_nu 5y ago
I like a good command line, but the whole search box thing is annoying me to no end because it not predictable. If I type three characters and press enter, it shouldn't matter if I wait 0.5 or 1.8 seconds before I press enter. But with this mechanic, it typically does. What is "set _rem_inder" one time is "_rem_ove all files" the next time.
nawgz 5y ago
The other day I used the Command Palette to symlink `code` as a command to open `vscode` without having to type `ln -s /path/to/vscode /usr/bin/vscode` which was quite nice because trying the symlink version gave me confusing errors. I am unsure the UX is there to help make that discoverable in a menu; you'd be so deep that it'd be behind multiple sub-nests at a minimum. Seems much better to have a flat search for this.
- fragmede 5y ago
  For anybody else looking, that particular command is called Shell Command: Install 'code' command in PATH.
JadeNB 5y ago
> I hate this trend. Give me back menus and toolbars. Everyone has their own preferences; personally, every time I open Word, I am confused and disoriented and have no idea where to look for what I want. I think it's best for no-one to try to impose their UI preference on everyone, and for all of us just to use the software with which we find it easiest to interact.
- thrower123 5y ago
  This is the way everyone not responsible for creating it has always viewed the Office Ribbon UI. Most cursed creation in software.
  - _dain_ 5y ago
    counterpoint: I'm an Excel power-user and I really like the ribbon UI. when you use the alt mode you can fly through it and opportunistically/incrementally learn the keyboard shortcuts.
    - CornCobs 5y ago
      Something that irks me a bit is that the UI (with it's animations) can't keep up with pressing keyboard shortcuts. For example in word to change font size you could just do Alt+h+fs+<number> but you can't just press it as a single chord, you kinda need to wait for the UI to focus on the correct fields to make sure you're at the correct place
  - copperx 5y ago
    I know UI is subjective, but when the Ribbon was introduced I thought it was the best UI idea I had ever seen. It made the Office apps interface much more discoverable and easy to use than without it. It's a shame that the Ribbon paradigm is patented.
- BurningPenguin 5y ago
  I think LibreOffice did it quite well with the ability to change the UI layout.
starkd 5y ago
It's easier to type commands when you have to do it alot. It uses muscle memory rather than deplete your attention span. Might be difficult at first, but it's easier once you get used to it.
- Const-me 5y ago
  For the use cases you’re talking about, I prefer keyboard shortcuts. No need to click search bar, or look at the search result list. One only needs to memorize, or setup, a keyboard shortcut like Ctrl+Shift+M, and with muscle memory it will consistently take well under 1 second. Search UX is slower, needs more clicks or key presses.
  - ok_dad 5y ago
    In vscode I press one set of keys and get fuzzy search access to every feature. I'd rather barely memorize the phrases to search with (several phrasing find the same settings for me) than to to memorize dozens of barely used hotkeys. Most of my day is scrolling through code and editing it occasionally, not doing actual commands from the menu or whatever. To each their own, however I can see how it would be annoying when they don't include a menu for anything for folks who prefer that.
userbinator 5y ago
I like to have both. AutoCAD is an example of a (very) complex application which has both.
- metaphor 5y ago
  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.
  - iamtedd 5y ago
    I've found AutoCAD can operate similar to how you describe Altium, in that pressing 'l' and enter gives you a line, typing 'str' gets you stretch, 'tr' gets you trim, shift-clicking with trim gets you the opposite of trim - extend. The command line has autocomplete. In this fashion, one hand operates the keyboard, and your other stays on the mouse. I quickly fell in love with this interface and immediately switched to using the command line for the vast majority of functions.
    - metaphor 5y ago
      AutoCAD is not like Altium in that the former requires either hitting Enter when the minimum command is entered, or more annoyingly, selecting from a slow-to-render autocomplete context menu with the mouse. Some common commands can also be annoying when the required minimum characters don't cleanly map to a single hand, e.g. [E][X][P][L][Enter] to explode; or when they map to the other hand, e.g. [P][L][Enter] for polyline. Altium's approach is literally single hotkey sequencing (i.e. no [Enter] after every command) which map directly to menus that underline each hotkey as a reminder, e.g. to [P]lace a [W]ire or [P]art in schematic capture, it's [P][W] or [P][P], respectively, while the menus change with ever key press. Yeah, your left hand is all over the keyboard, but every key press is a meaningful context switch.
wodenokoto 5y ago
One of the best features of OSX is that programs have menu bars. I didn't even know they had removed the menus from VS Code on other platforms. I still can't find anything in word, except on mac, where there is an actual menu. Anyway, the removing of menus was not caused by the addition of command palettes. I think the history is that microsoft believed icons was easier than text, so they made the ribbons, and then for a while other removed menus in favor of ribbons, but then they realized ribbons sucks, so they removed those, and then there was nothing, maybe a hamburger menu if one of the UX's had done webdesign before.
- jakear 5y ago
  VS code has menus on all platforms. All platforms also provide native menus. (Work on VSCode)
  - wodenokoto 5y ago
    Parent said menus were gone and I just did a quick search for screen shots and saw one from windows without top menu and assumed parent to be correct. Thanks for clarifying.
  - thrower123 5y ago
    The problem is that there is nothing in the menus
underwater 5y ago
These paradigms can be complementary. Menus and toolbars for when the user is browsing and they don't know what they want, command bars for when the user knows what they want but not how to get there, and shortcut keys for when they know what they want and how to get there.
p2t2p 5y ago
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.
- thrower123 5y ago
  I'm a Windows programmer, and I'm old enough to remember when UX was something people took seriously.
  - p2t2p 5y ago
    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.
still_grokking 5y ago
Toolbars for the stuff you don't use frequently and therefore don't know the keyboard shortcuts, but still need those functions now and than. But menus? Nobody would need them if command palettes would have some discoverable hierarchic structure to them. That's the last missing part to make command palettes "perfect".

feep 5y ago

Such a well written article/history. I applaud the trend. Love it. More smart-type CLIish interfaces, please.

maguay 5y ago
author here, thank you!
- dmortin 5y ago
  Emacs should also have been mentioned, because M-x is a simple command palette and it's there for 30-40 years or so.
  - maguay 5y ago
    Great point.

blondin 5y ago

> "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 hover or have tooltips on mobile". they are trying to achieve uniformity between mobile and desktop. they will probably confine that useful command palette to particular apps too. because you can't have a command palette on mobile either.

jrochkind1 5y ago
I don't understand the relationship you are suggesting between tooltips and feeling that you can try things without damaging the system.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  It's harder to damage things if tooltips give you some idea of what's going to happen when you push a button.
- worldsayshi 5y ago
  Either you have a tooltip explaining the function or you have to test it to understand what it does. But to test something you want to know it doesn't cause problems. I feel like this is some fundamental UX dimension here. Cost and risk of learning. How much time do I have to use to learn all the commands or find the right command and if I have to try it what is the risk of breaking something? Just as relevant in cli applications.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    Another thing that helps is a predictable, reliable undo function. If the user believes that any action is easy to undo, unknown actions won't be so scary. Of course, this is sort of a chicken-and-egg problem, because other than ctrl-z in certain desktop environments (in which environments undo is not always either predictable or reliable), there is no well-known idiom for undo.

arusahni 5y ago

I'm okay with command palettes, but hate how they steal ctrl/cmd + k. I use that in Firefox to focus the search bar. If you implement such a shortcut, please make it configurable!

godDLL 5y ago
Wait, wasn't that Cmd-L?
- n3t 5y ago
  ctrl+k → focus the search bar ctrl+l → focus the address bar
  - clusterfish 5y ago
    Why do people use a separate search bar, when typing the search query into the address bar works the same? Unless you're often searching for strings that look like URLs?
    - gsich 5y ago
      You don't lose your search query with a separate bar.
    - arusahni 5y ago
      In addition to what gsich said, URLs you type don't get sent to your search engine for suggestion autocompletion.

underwater 5y ago

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.

godDLL 5y ago
That's right. Did you see/use Fish as a shell? I'm having much fun scripting in the Fish language at the moment, and using the shell in interactive programs.
firexcy 5y ago
I'd like to add a third, pro-terminal point, that cli tools are inherently ready to be scripted, piped, executed in batch and in parallel, none of which are common in gui apps with or without command palattes.
worldsayshi 5y ago
Is love to see a command palette terminal fusion. Thought about this many times.
- austinjp 5y ago
  Although I don't use it, I see plenty of positive feedback about fzf [0] and I'm sure I've seen palette-style tools built with it that enable command and options discovery. [0] https://github.com/junegunn/fzf https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
- slightwinder 5y ago
  People do this already with fuzzy-finders. fzf or rofi to name some. See here for some usages: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/wiki/Related-projects https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/wiki/Related-projects
- p2t2p 5y ago
  I use fzf as command autocomplete tool in my zsh. It is still not a command palette but gets pretty close.

fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago

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.

dkdbejwi383 5y ago
This is one of those tiny seemingly inconsequential things that keeps me hooked on Mac OS
- marcodiego 5y ago
  This was available on ubuntu unity in 2012.
  - barsonme 5y ago
    That’s great for Ubuntu!
    - alex_smart 5y ago
      Except they dropped the feature when they switched to GNOME 3 in 2017.
      - duckmysick 5y ago
        There's Plotinus: https://github.com/p-e-w/plotinus https://github.com/p-e-w/plotinus I've tried it, but it doesn't work in most of the apps I use like LibreOffice, Firefox, Double Commander.
- noisem4ker 5y ago
  KDE also does it: https://pointieststick.com/2021/05/21/this-week-in-kde-kcommandbar-delivers-ludicrous-mode-productivity/ https://pointieststick.com/2021/05/21/this-week-in-kde-kcomm...
  - 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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wodenokoto 5y ago

I love the command palette in Sublime, but it doesn't cover every menu item, which seems weird. There are also, kinda 3 palettes: Goto symbol Goto Anything Command Palette

marcodiego 5y ago

Ubuntu had that with their Unity UI since at least 2012: https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yzdfLbKQy08/XMqOc0TkS0I/AAAAAAAAV80/oe6jGTCdAiwLQrk5cfI6e82TAyo2y6fFACLcBGAs/s1600/Screenshot%2Bfrom%2B2019-05-02%2B13-29-46.png https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1SSxfxI-2WQ/XMqNh1byhBI/AAAAAAAAV8s/uf3v9x3_mP806tPp-chXntSUNIuyD5f1gCLcBGAs/s1600/Screenshot%2Bfrom%2B2019-05-02%2B13-25-33.png https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oNj-HJIiWIc/XMqRaQZUjaI/AAAAAAAAV88/d0VgS8q3Yb8AFaJ-EOVtM2PAXf2jJlijgCLcBGAs/s1600/Screenshot%2Bfrom%2B2019-05-02%2B13-42-23.png

frosted-flakes 5y ago
If you take your URLs out of code blocks they'll actually show up as links. https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yzdfLbKQy08/XMqOc0TkS0I/AAAAAAAAV80/oe6jGTCdAiwLQrk5cfI6e82TAyo2y6fFACLcBGAs/s1600/Screenshot%2Bfrom%2B2019-05-02%2B13-29-46.png https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yzdfLbKQy08/XMqOc0TkS0I/AAAAAAAAV... https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1SSxfxI-2WQ/XMqNh1byhBI/AAAAAAAAV8s/uf3v9x3_mP806tPp-chXntSUNIuyD5f1gCLcBGAs/s1600/Screenshot%2Bfrom%2B2019-05-02%2B13-25-33.png https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1SSxfxI-2WQ/XMqNh1byhBI/AAAAAAAAV... https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oNj-HJIiWIc/XMqRaQZUjaI/AAAAAAAAV88/d0VgS8q3Yb8AFaJ-EOVtM2PAXf2jJlijgCLcBGAs/s1600/Screenshot%2Bfrom%2B2019-05-02%2B13-42-23.png https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oNj-HJIiWIc/XMqRaQZUjaI/AAAAAAAAV...

crummy 5y ago

Reminds me of this tweet: https://twitter.com/Pentadact/status/1432428893269467137 https://twitter.com/Pentadact/status/1432428893269467137 > The convention of being able to search Settings menus feels like one of the only things that's got unambiguously Better about software UX in about a decade.

robertwt7 5y ago

I can't remember the last time I browse through the menu bar / tool bar / start menu in windows / apps list in apple. In vs code, i do command pallette, in iTerm i use fzf, in mac i use spotlight, in iphone i use spotlight to find apps, in windows i press start then start typing to search.. It is true, it is the norm! It's just super convenient

donatj 5y ago

Rhino 3D allows you to type in anything you can do with the mouse. You just start typing, no shortcut first. It's feels like a beautiful marriage of powerful command line app and equally powerful and pretty UI. I've been using it regularly since around 2002 and this functionality has always been core to its being. It makes discoverability hugely simple, just start typing what I want to do. I've always wondered why more tools haven't had similar functionality. I'm glad to see the growing population of command palletes some 20 years later.

com2kid 5y ago
Rhino 3D is my favorite piece of software. I used to use it for hours a day, and it felt like a natural extension of my mind. It was truly a perfect merger of UI and command line. People keep on telling me how amazing Blender or SketchUp is, and they just can't understand that the perfect 3D modeling program with the perfect UI already exists, and has existed for over 20 years now.

seanwilson 5y ago

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 do this on Mac? Why? I found this really jarring. I know on Mac you can press CTRL + F2 (add Fn key if you have one) to change the keyboard focus to the menus but it doesn't underline the letters that will work and you have to hit enter to open things so it's clunky. The command palette is nice for discovery of lesser used commands and when there's lots of them but it's less predictable what keys you need to press to fuzzy search to the command you know is there and it doesn't teach your fingers the shortest key combo to trigger it.

miffy900 5y ago
It is annoying, but CMD+? (help menu search) I think makes up for it. It's far more useful for when you're navigating an unfamiliar interface.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
rz2k 5y ago
Especially in Excel, using the keyboard to do everything is vastly superior in Windows. However in MacOS `command-shift-/` (⌘?) immediately shifts focuses to the help menu where you can begin typing to navigate directly to any command that appears in an application's menus, without needing to know where the command is hierarchically organized. It's very fast, and seems to work everywhere. I have Karabiner-Elements configured to register ⌘? whenever I press and release the left control alone without using it as a modifier of any other key. The `to_if_alone` condition in Karabiner-Elements is one of my favorite ways to re-use all of the modifier keys to invoke special commands. It would be great if I could figure out how to do that in Windows.
- 5y ago

tambourine_man 5y ago

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 the Vim/Terminal ubergeek with almost nothing in between. I remember being floored by bureau in the 90s that completely automated their Photoshop and QuarkXPress workflow with AppleScript just by hitting the record button (not a single line of code written), folder actions, smart file placement and similar tricks.

aidenn0 5y ago
I think that the fraction of users who are power users has gone down as the people who own a computing device has gone from "those willing to shell out the price of a used car" to "everybody"
voidfunc 5y ago
Killed by design. Companies that build products or services hate power users because they limit the ability to sell customizations or pro service engagements. Software is now designed to be hard to manipulate outside of the expected workflows unless you are willing to pay for a software engineer or three (either internally or via aforementioned PS) to figure out.
- yourapostasy 5y ago
  > ...hate power users because they limit the ability to sell customizations or pro service engagements. Never ascribe to malice... Having sat on the product side before with some of my clients, I can describe it from their point of view. Power users typically consume a disproportionate share of support engineering and development engineering hours per account compared to their normal user calls from an accounting perspective. The holistic, value-adding way to approach this is to work more closely with the individual power users to find out what they are doing in detail for each of their industries, find commonalities, and push product capabilities in those directions. The reflexive accounting response is invariably "make the power users stop using support services so much". Engineering then gets asked, "how do we stop these kinds of questions?", and the holistic response is shut down because "that costs too much, I want another option". You can see where this is leading...the features power users leverage get sunset, and finance/accounting is happy when they become responsible for a KPI improvement. ...while ignoring that any of them would give their eye teeth for the kind of profit lock-in Excel delivers, and under their KPI regime, Excel power users would have been stillborn. Never ascribe to malice, that which is adequately explained by incentive structuring. BTW, I usually clarify with leadership what they envision in these situations in a behind-closed-doors meeting that doesn't challenge them. Most of them honestly do not want Excel-like lock-in via power users. They feel it is too fraught a road and that they can achieve lock-in in other ways. Fair enough, and my due diligence advising them is discharged (I might not agree, but there comes a time to help the organization put all its wood behind a single arrow).

jiehong 5y ago

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). But it does allow you to add a shortcut to a command you find on the fly, which is great. [0] https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm

tra3 5y ago
Yeah I’m surprised nobody mentioned emacs. The only thing missing is auto complete not just on command names but the descriptions also.
- NateEag 5y ago
  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/Apropos.html 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.
  - tra3 5y ago
    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.
    - NateEag 5y ago
      I moved from Helm to Ivy a while back, but yeah. Booting into vanilla Emacs is almost a foreign country to me now.

tonglil 5y ago

The worst thing about this site is it hijacks ctrl-f. Don't do that.

jrootabega 5y ago
Yeah, I was going to comment that, like the article mentions, it seems I can search for anything...except for the text in the article.

bitwize 5y ago

M-x has entered the chat.

KennedyHere 5y ago

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?

selfhoster11 5y ago
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.

scop 5y ago

There really is something to be said about the Command Pallete and UX design as a whole. I started out using Sublime Text as that was the easiest out-of-the-gate editor. I then spent several years in a fully customized tmux + vim configuration. A lot of fun! But it got stale, and then I spent several years in Emacs. And then VSCode came along with a lot of conveniences, and thus I used that for a year or two. Now, almost a decade after teaching myself how to program and making a career out of it, I’m back to using a pretty bare bones Sublime environment. It does what I need and it does it fast. My inner quest to become The Poweruser has been replaced by a quaint appreciation of simplicity. Thanks Sublime! (though it should be said: I’ve always used Vim-bindings, the pinnacle, in all these apps)

wildrhythms 5y ago
I went through a series of phases just like you're describing, but I eventually settled on vim + COC as my "home" editor. The COC plugin has been a game changer for me; all of the conveniences of a language server without the bloat of a full-featured editor like VS Code. https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim

analog31 5y ago

The complexity of software has caught up with the GUI. Getting a generation of people to approach and use computers was great. But the GUI was never "intuitive" unless "intuitive" means that you can be trained to recognize a certain number of symbols. And that number is finite, when they're always changing. Here's how it struck me like a freight train: I was looking at some instructions for installing certain "drivers" for some technical hardware. The instructions for Windows computers was a series of color glossy screen shots, with circles and arrows, and a paragraph under each one. Of course they were particularly hard to follow because they hadn't been updated to the last revision of the OS. In contrast, the Linux instructions were: sudo apt install foo bar blah ... sudo add a line to this file ... And even instructions for Windows computers are adopting this strategy: Press Windows-R+cmd, enter these commands I love the crude palette consisting of pressing the Windows key and typing some gibberish into the search bar, like "device manager" or "bluetooth settings." Much better than trying to remember where those things are located. And incrementally improving the search function will keep making it better. I hope. This could be the backdoor route into natural language computing.

Tagbert 5y ago
I think that there will always be a dynamic balance between GUI interactions and command line interactions. Command line is efficient and good for applications and function that you use on a regular basis, but can be difficult with apps that you are new to or only use occasionally. A proper UI should be able to accommodate both the efficiency of familiarity and the discoverability for a novice.
hunter2_ 5y ago
Conversational interfaces, i.e., chat bots including Google Assistant, take this approach but eliminate the pre-submit feedback that is so handy if you're at a keyboard.
pjerem 5y ago
This have been discussed here but there was a time (Windows 9x/XP area) where GUIs were « intuitive but with some learning curve ». Of course it was a little harder (but not that much) to master the tools of this era but once you understood the basic paradigms (files, folders, windows, menus, toolbars, common discoverability, common keyboard shortcuts, F1 for help…) you could become proficient in any unknown software way more faster than today. Now, there is nearly no transferable knowledge between 2 softwares. For me this looks like « knowledge lock-in » (which adds to the vendor and data lock-in, btw). Well, we still have Linux if we want to learn something useful. But even there if you use it professionally, you’re probably going to be stuck with all those « I’m unique » Electron apps. tbf, I think what we are missing is a truly high quality multi platform GUI toolkit able to work with modern language. Most are still only officially supporting C++ and nobody wants to write a complex application in C++ anymore.

mikek 5y ago

A good article on how to build good Command Palettes: https://blog.superhuman.com/how-to-build-a-remarkable-command-palette/ https://blog.superhuman.com/how-to-build-a-remarkable-comman...

spurgu 5y ago

Why Does Someone Still Think it's a Good Idea to Type Like This? It makes titles horribly unreadable, being unable to decipher the subject and other grammatical details. Let's invoke cancel culture on this motherfucker!

lgrialn 5y ago

This is so fawning and… something like name-dropping.

freewizard 5y ago

Anyone notices pressing Cmd-F / Ctrl-F on this linked article pops up a website launcher in that page? It's so neat and I want that in my Quicksilver / Alfred!

jessaustin 5y ago
Very subtle irony...

gumby 5y ago

> one of the defining features of this decade’s software. Seems a bit much. Typing commands never went away. And the population of Sublime users must be a negligible fraction of all software users. I’d say things of the scale of machine learning have been more defining features of this decade’s software.

kordlessagain 5y ago

kordless@gmail.com~> The History of Command Palettes: How Typing Commands Became The Norm Again | Capiche description The most popular new interface element in business software lets you tell apps exactly what you want to do. created 2020-12-22T21:03:43Z AI is in a conversation about an interesting article, on a popular website. Be nice. explanation The command palette allows you to quickly enter keyboard commands for common software actions and functions.For casual use, command palettes greatly improve on file menus: the list of available operations is easily searchable and you don't have to remember which menu each operation appear. For more skilled users

rg111 5y ago

This could be TLDRd as- - Before, there was the command line, where you had to type specific commands to get things done. - That was complicated, and GUI made it simpler. First there was a small number of buttons. - Then, GUIs fell prey to featurecreep, and included too much. Hence cometh the Command Palette where you can find anything. I first felt the problem in my android Settings. After about 2017, there were simply too much stuff in Settings. I could not get anything done. The search function really saved me there. Now I use command palette wherever I can. In my Linux installed laptops- both at work and home- I get everything done through the palette. I barely ever manually go to places.

joshspankit 5y ago

It’s mentioned in the comments but is worth highlighting. Quicksilver was so far ahead of it’s time that I would say that Spotlight, Alfred, Mac’s Help search, and a whole boatload of Windows/Linux apps were a direct result of it. If you get an opportunity, run an early version coded by Merlin in an old version of OSX

brumm 5y ago
I love Quicksilver, it's an extension of my brain at this point. It's also still alive: https://github.com/quicksilver/Quicksilver https://github.com/quicksilver/Quicksilver

vjancik 5y ago

Autocomplete makes all the difference. Especially ones that also search the command description.

jodrellblank 5y ago

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 people from arrow keys and mouse use, which is demonstrated on the CanonCat computer from 1987 in this[2] video on YouTube. [1] https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=4790 https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=4790 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c

randkyp 5y ago
"A search is either incremental or excremental." - Jef Raskin
mushiake 5y ago
maybe Archy[1] you thinking about? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software)
kragen 5y ago
Right, The Humane Environment, following on his work with the Canon Cat and the Macintosh, before Steve Jobs took over the project and made it into a better Lisa. Later they renamed THE to the more googlable "Archy", a pun on RCHI, the Raskin Center for the Humane Interface, shortly before Jef's surprising death from pancreatic cancer. Jef's son Aza unfortunately hasn't kept Jef's stuff online, and he also invented infinite scroll websites. Nice guy though. LEAP was Emacs incremental-search, but on the Cat the idea was to use it to replace all cursor movement except "creep" left and right arrows. Thanks for the video! I had never seen it. YT suggested https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jErqdRE5zpQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jErqdRE5zpQ, another Cat video. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XZomNp9TyPY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XZomNp9TyPY shows a brief clip of the Forth interpreter.

Helmut10001 5y ago

The same idea applies to Keypirinha [1], a small tool to open Apps etc. on Windows by typing. E.g. hit ALT+Space, type F.. and it'll immediately suggest Firefox, based on your previous use patterns. No menus, no clicking, no mouse. Just awesome. [1]: https://keypirinha.com/ https://keypirinha.com/

vort3 5y ago
Finally some appreciation for my favourite thing. Once you go Keypirinha, there's no going back. First thing I install on any machine I use. Have you seen PackageControl?
- Helmut10001 5y ago
  Nice, thanks! So far I use chocolatey [1]. It is good, although some apps tend to be outdated (I can live with that, for the moment, it is not that worse yet). Will definitely keep in my Package Control. [1]: https://chocolatey.org/ https://chocolatey.org/
  - Helmut10001 5y ago
    Apologies, I think you referred to Keypirinha-PackageControl [1]. Did no know this. Thanks! [1]: https://github.com/ueffel/Keypirinha-PackageControl https://github.com/ueffel/Keypirinha-PackageControl

kevincox 5y ago

These command palettes are fantastic *if you know what you are looking for*. The reason is that the results page is ephemeral. I see many websites copying this type of design but using it for searching documents where it is far less clear which I want just based on the title. I end up having to redo my search, scroll to where I was, and try the next candidate over and over again.