3 ms·
> I prefer using the mouse mostly because I cannot remember all of the shortcuts in a range of different environments. This is why one of the greatest changes
by lolinder 2y ago
> I prefer using the mouse mostly because I cannot remember all of the shortcuts in a range of different environments.
This is why one of the greatest changes in power user tooling in recent years is the "find anywhere" hotkey, which is now available almost everywhere.
Mouse interaction is slow and hardly a panacea for finding features buried in menus. "Find anywhere" type interactions with fuzzy search allow you to use they keyboard and highly mnemonic abbreviations to turn up what you're looking for. With a few exceptions, I tend to lean on them even for things that I use regularly, because it's easier to learn which few keystrokes will turn up the option I'm looking for than it is to rebind a fresh hotkey in each environment or, as you say, memorize the built-in one.
- skydhash 2y ago> one of the greatest changes in power user tooling in recent years Alt+x in Emacs was here for ages. Even the command prompt in vim follows the same pattern. And while it's useful, I still prefers to bind commonly use commands to keybinding, especially if there can be prefix.
- lolinder 2y agoThere's a reason I didn't say "innovation"—I knew that people would immediately point out it's been around forever. What's new is that it's in mainstream tooling.
- RossBencina 2y ago> "find anywhere" hotkey, which is now available almost everywhere Almost everywhere? I'd love to see a list of other examples. The only place I can name is the vscode Ctrl-Shift-P thing, and in that case it's a wholesale replacement for an explorable/discoverable UI (i.e. traditional menu bar). Sure there are search boxes in other places, but usually that's literally for finding things, not for performing application domain commands/actions/manipulations, which is what I understood the parent to be describing.
- fifticon 2y agoI wish the 'find anywhere' instead expanded and highlighted the correct place of that command in the menu. In that way, it would teach me gradually a mental map of the shape and set of commands I have available, ie I imagine it would let me notice 'neighbour commands'. I realise this is not the most efficient way to do this, but it would be 'incremental on the job learning'.
- csb6 2y agomacOS does this when searching for a command in the Help menu - it will open up the context menu and highlight the place where the command is so you know where it is next time.
- vincnetas 2y agoFun anectada. Was launching Remote desktop app which was unsurprisingly called: "Microsoft Remote Desktop" by just typing "Remo" in to a spotlight. Then one day it stoped working. I thought i was going crazy, because i dont remember that i uninstalled it. Spotlight was returning no results. Then i found out that someone at microsoft thought that it was a great idea to rename the app to ... "Windows App". What the hell were they smoking?
- zombot 2y agoAnd what is the "find anywhere" hotkey that works everywhere?
- swah 2y agoOP is talking about the "Cmd + P" aka "Run command" command. Ideally it should list the shortcuts of the commands you run so next time you can do that directly.
- lolinder 2y agoThe MacOS-wide equivalent is Cmd+Shift+/, which searches all menu items. KDE has a similar idea built into the global menu.
- swah 2y agoIf OSes were optimized like RTS games, maybe the mouse could be plenty fast. Something like https://charmstone.app/ https://charmstone.app/ but for many actions.