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Comment by kybernetikos | Hacker News Reader

Paint.net is another example of an application that reifies its actions with a nice 'history' window that shows the semantic actions that the user has performed and allows you to jump back to earlier points in your history of editing the file. GIMP does something similar, it seems particularly common in image editing programs.

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Ditto for AutoCAD -- I loved seeing how the equivalent CLI command appeared in the log as I was using the GUI to draw.

I was thinking about this just a few days ago. This seems like a much better way of teaching people shortcuts than a 20-page cheat-sheet or even "hints" in various menus. No UI clutter, no effort. The program just tells you how to do the same thing in another way. The more you do the "thing", the more likely you are to notice those tips and try out the shortcuts.

I don't think Paint.NET or GIMP do quite what you've described though. They show a history of action, but they don't show commands.

Now I don't have lots of experience with Blender, but I do remember that Blender when hovering a button shows the Title of the interaction, but also a description, shortcut AND the equivalent python code you can run in the terminal to achieve that action. That's pretty awesome.

Here is a example: https://i.imgur.com/NNFruMx.jpg

Related: Emacs does that too. If you invoke a command through M-x that has a keyboard binding available, it will tell you about it in the minibuffer.

You also see this in chip design EDA tools, at least the good ones. Not only will they record the equivalent CLI command that affects the "data", but some will also record the commands that solely affect the GUI! (e.g. resize window)

That reminds me of more extreme work like Bret Victor’s drawing dynamic visualization demo, where drawing commands are reified and can be manipulated/abstracted in place. I saw Dan Ingals do this with some of his work, but can’t find a link ATM.

https://vimeo.com/66085662

It's a common technique for document-centric editors in general, because it's usually also the best way to implement multi-step undo. Once you have the steps recorded anyway for that purpose, surfacing them in UI is straightforward.

one day people will have DAG based programs where history has even less importance

I'm curios what you mean by this. I've been working on some software called textgraph [1] (not yet ready for use, and now internally renamed gradesta ) for a couple of years now, so anything with "graph" in it makes my ears perk up.

[1] http://timothy.hobbs.cz/tg/tg.html

the paint.net stacked history is similar to what was used in 3D studio max in the 90s. It was "cool" but too linear (it's a stack after all).

Other software like Houdini or Maya (or NR Shake) used DAG (acyclic graph) of operations to create an output scene/image. There the history isnt linear it's a bit of a multiverse, you can disconnect part of the graph, try new things, reconnect. Everything is there.

Like a modern version control system?

It's the same underlying structure, replace commit by different kinds of operations.

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