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Comment by time4tea | Hacker News Reader

AutoCAD amongst other software has been doing this for about 25+ years, I think. Clicky-clicky if you want, or just type in the command, same output.

IntelliJ also, more recently, with its actions input.

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Ubuntu also tried mixing GUI and CLI in its Unity HUD [1] as part of their "intent-driven interface". The HUD retrofitted all existing menus of an application into hierarchical, searchable and "autocompletable" actions. In all applications you could press the super key (the "Windows key") and start typing what you were looking for.

In my personal experience, the search functionality was extremely useful when using for the first time one a complex application such as Gimp or Libre Office. Unfortunately all extra functionalities (autocomplete, for instance) required the applications to explicitly support the HUD and few (any?) application added the necessary code once GNOME 3 appeared.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/HUD

I absolutely loved autocad for this. One hand on the keyboard, one on the mouse is an easy way to double your productivity. The speed at which you could draw things was amazing. I had a custom alias file with most commonly used shortcuts and the enter key was bound to right click which removed the need to move your left hand over the keyboard. This was in the 2000. Sadly the more recent versions I have tried make this harder to do. If I hadn’t switched career I’d still be using autocad 2000 !

I use DraftSight with AutoHotkey and a Razer Naga, makes CAD work very swift!

Yeah, spot on ! Autocad has been doing that mix of GUI and CLI for soooo loong. Example :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgz2kqm0rsY

20 years ago I remember seeing a person drawing mechanical plans using a lot of keyboard and just a bit of mouse. That seemed really productive.

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