Command K Bars

> By stashing infrequently-used items in a command bar like this, […] You don’t need to add that extra toolbar or layer of menu items.

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.

The problem with this pattern is that command-k was already a commonly used shortcut for creating a link, which meant that products like Slack had to find something new for making a link so they overloaded paste which is super broken as a result.

I'll just mention that if you follow the link and read the article, linger a while.

Maggie Appleton's site is delightfully designed and thoughtful written. There are a ton of wonderful articles to enjoy there.

How did these come to be associated with command-k and not command-p, which is the more common association at least for developer tools (chrome, vs code, sublime, figma, obsidian)? Command P makes sense since it is a Palette. Maybe it is just a weird quirk that all developer-facing tools use one binding while tools for the hoi polloi use the other.

Particularly offensive to try to name the whole concept after Slack’s default keybinding.

Some fun history on how the cmd-k shortcut came to be:

https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/153937

Also, emacs M-x from 1980 or maybe TECO's extended command from 1978 (learned these from Bobbie Chen who wrote https://digitalseams.com/blog/why-do-sublime-text-and-vs-cod...)

It's so frustrating when websites hijack this shortcut.

PowerToys is the Windows equivalent

I'm glad to see that other software companies had recognized the power of M-x, which had been in Emacs since before GNU Emacs.

Now if only they'd understand the power of immediate, pervasive extensibility in Lisp (Autodesk did!).