Navigational Instruments (2020)

I appreciate this a lot. I've had https://wiki.tilde.institute/w/firefox-address-bar-tips as my new window homepage in firefox for some time. It has changed how I use bookmarks and history alongside OneTab to keep track of the might-be-interesting-later pages I need to return to. This feels like the next level of the same!

Cool. I didn't know about "Ctrl+T, Ctrl+Z"; I've always used "Alt+D, Alt+Enter" to duplicate tabs. This other shortcut might come in handy if I want to immediately edit the URL.

I cover the "search keyword" use case with DuckDuckGo's bangs, but it seems even more general than that. Good to know. It's unfortunate that DDG's search quality is still behind Google's, as bad as the latter's still is, so the utility is still limited compared to searching those sites directly with bangs (e.g. !gh, !so, !bugzilla).

> Add ? to show only search suggestions.

> Hitting Ctrl-enter in the URL bar works like autocomplete;”mozilla” go straight to www.mozilla.com, for example. Shift-enter will open a URL in a new tab.

These work in chrome too, except new window rather then new tab.

I honestly can't remember if I've seen this done before or if it was some early morning dream[0].

My pet peeve is user interfaces that provide no "discovery" aspect. I'm not referring to those obnoxious "introduction" tips that occur with a lot of software when you first use them or when a new version comes out. Those tend to be heavy-handed -- stopping the action or preventing you from using the application without clicking "Skip" somewhere. I'm talking about "hints" in a place that is obvious but not overwhelming.

Unfortunately, the "minimalism" of the last few decades has seen a lot of these kinds of hints disappear, entirely, from places they had previously existed. Many applications have eliminated things like "showing what keyboard command would trigger a drop-down/hamburger[2] menu item directly".

Back in the "bad old days", nearly everything that was commonly used (Cut/Paste, etc) would include a "Ctrl-C" or "Shift-Ins" note next to the menu item.

One area that's really common and extremely opaque is the "mouse with keyboard modifier" command. Graphics applications (Photoshop) and especially 3D design tools (Blender comes to mind) can be totally unusable without knowing that "dragging with the middle button while pressing ALT rotates the view around an set fixed/anchor point" where just dragging with the middle button rotates the view treating the "camera"'s location as the fixed point.

The mouse cursor has traditionally served a couple of very simple purposes: to identify where you're clicking and to provide visual feedback on "whether or not clicking on that will do anything[1]"

My "dream" mouse cursor would -- upon initiating a drag, display "what the action of dragging will do" along with the available modifier keys with a single word or very small description of what it does floating by the cursor in as much of a "non-distracting" manner as possible. Upon clicking the modifier, anything "helpful" in using that feature should surface.

I must have used Photoshop through two or three versions before I figured out that you can hold the Spacebar while creating a new selection to have it "lock the shape while allowing you to move the selection around". Things like the "circle selection" tool were always impossible to line up correctly without modifying the initial attempt at placing the thing in the right location.

For a simpler software, the extra context might amount to simply changing the cursor to a more obvious symbol for the action, but considering how many web applications with fancy "replacements for built-in things like select lists" fail to set the cursor correctly, I'm not holding my breath that anything like this will ever happen.

[0] I can't be the only one on this site who regularly dreams about code/software. I'm not saying I don't have a problem, just that I'm in good company. :)

[1] Minor, sometimes confusing, additional context is provided, like the "finger" sometimes indicating that you'll navigate to a new link, but can also mean "select an item in a list" which can also be a simple arrow.

[2] To Firefox's credit, a lot of menu items include the shortcut key.

This was new to me:

* You can use this trick [Ctrl-Reload] to pop stuff out of the middle of your back and forward history stack into new tabs.

They keep suggesting "#" and "$" but those don't work.

This is rather EMACS-like. I thought we were past that in user interfaces.