Command Palette Interfaces

I really love this pattern. However let me rant on two poor implementations in the Windows world: the experience is heavily dependent on the startup speed, and the immutability of the items presented. The Windows taskbar search has neither speed nor order reliability, and Visual Studio’s Quick Menu is terribly slow to even pop up. Office also implemented it as a Quick Menu, similar to Visual Studio, and it’s not very fast either. It’s a real bummer.

Edit: PowerTools also includes an Alfred-like launcher, and its pretty feature full. if it could pop up consistenly (its a bit buggy) at a reliable speed, I would replace the Windows taskbar search with it.

I absolutely love these things.

Keeps interfaces clean and improves UX simultaneously (in almost all cases) - a win/win.

I've started building my projects with shorcuts + command palettes as the default execution mode for new features, where the rule is:

- Build the feature with keyboard shortcuts + command palette first

- Add GUI/modals/buttons/etc either at the same time or later

A command palette is what we're basing our UX rebuild over at https://grey-wing.com, so I can point out some additional benefits, drawbacks and fixes:

A command palette when implemented correctly, can also strike a balance between older users and power users. It doesn't hold power users back, but the verbose nature of the instructions and command (no more undecipherable icons and strange UI interactions) can also be easier for older, less techy users - IF implemented well with a lot of testing.

There is still a lack of discoverability with a command palette. Our solution has been to include commonly used commands, and most popular commands alongside, as well as introducing some new ones intermittently.

One more problem is context. More complicated commands may be harder to grok or conversely very long for users to remember. The UNIX solution is switches, which is short but hard to remember (https://xkcd.com/1168/), and the alternative is long sentences which is hard to parse, perhaps too long, and has too much variation to be reliable.

Finally, they're also a great way to discover what paths your users would like to go down but can't. It's hard to understand what button they couldn't find or what label they didn't understand from a traditional UI, even with extensive user interviews and analytics. With an omnibox, each failed search is a point of information to you.

http://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/ is the best implementation of this pattern. It’s sad how browser’s select element usually grinds to a halt with a dictionary of words whilst dmenu feels instant.

I love these interfaces and use them wherever I can. On MacOS I use Alfred for launching applications, killing processes, controlling music playback, searching the web and my filesystem, swapping file tabs, and tons more. Spotlight search, which is built in, is also very competent. For the command line I use fzf which can add fuzzy search for all sorts of things. built in its ctrl+r functionality I find very useful. As well as kill commands where i can fuzzy search by the name of the program and it'll type in the pid for you. fasd is useful for navigating through directories, though it doesn't pop up a palette.

For those interested here is a small list of them, though not comprehensive, that I've found useful:

Launchers

MacOS

- https://www.alfredapp.com/

- https://raycast.com/

- https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html

- https://lacona.app/

Windows

- https://keypirinha.com/

- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/run

Linux:

- https://github.com/davatorium/rofi

- http://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/

Command line

- https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

- https://github.com/clvv/fasd

- vim : https://github.com/junegunn/fzf.vim

Emacs

- https://emacs-helm.github.io/helm

- https://github.com/abo-abo/swiper