Maggie Appleton's site is delightfully designed and thoughtful written. There are a ton of wonderful articles to enjoy there.
I’m concerned, from this description, about people putting features only in a command palette, and rendering features completely undiscoverable.
This is one of the big problems of Windows’ Start Menu ever since Vista. In XP, you could find all your programs easily. Vista kinda hid them, and Windows 8 hid them a little more, and 11 hid them a lot more. They’re still there, but honestly difficult to find.
So please make sure your features are still discoverable.
Also remember that a lot of users are shockingly bad at typing. Command bars are a power user feature.
It’s always present and cannot be hidden by app developers, and so there’s no reason to not populate it, and thus the menubar serves as a consistently available master index of the program’s functions. That alone makes it invaluable.
Mind you, app-defined command palettes can be better than a global one because they can provide more information and context and augment it with other widgets as appropriate. The best command palettes are not just a searchable version of the menu, they add more.
The app-defined palette enables more rich functionality as you’ve mentioned, while the system-owned global menu provides a consistent way to see everything an app is capable of without hunting and pecking through the palette. The menu also serves as a unified API for assistive and automation technology to interact with software and allows users to choose how the menus are displayed (don’t like a top-aligned menubar? Cool, your desktop can present it as window attached menus, a pie menu, or NeXT style floating menus or anything else you can imagine).
There’s incentive for the menu bar to be properly populated with all the functions that a program offers. Mac users expect it.
Compare with non-standard Mac apps (mainly Electron apps or ports from other OS), modern Windows apps, and many Linux apps where the menu bar is often a second class citizen or completely absent, leaving you to the whims of the developer rather than enjoying conformance to a system-wide standard.
Now if only they'd understand the power of immediate, pervasive extensibility in Lisp (Autodesk did!).
It makes me sad to watch how some of the smartest and most resourceful programmers on the planet just keep ignoring the immense power, liberation, and joy that knowing some Lisp can grant you. Reminds me the quote from Idiocracy - "for the smartest guy in the world, you're pretty dumb sometimes"...
Particularly offensive to try to name the whole concept after Slack’s default keybinding.
But I'm not disagreeing in principle, I personally use so many of these fuzzy search things in so many apps, all with different keybinds (which is maddening in another way) - and maybe that's just the objectively most well-known one?
In most apps, press "cmd-shift ?" And you will activate the help search. I know, I know. We don't need help, but the other thing it does is reveal menu items from the native menubar.
It's great for finding fiddly commands in complex native apps.
mikey_p•3w ago