Command Palettes
207 words, ~1 minute read. Planted .
Command palettes are a design pattern where apps expose functionality through a search bar
Typing what you want is almost certainly easier and faster than finding the action in some submenu or remembering an arcane hotkey
- Especially with fuzzy search that also looks through descriptions of actions
- Command palettes scale very well with large amounts of actions
Artificial Intelligence will make command palettes increasingly powerful
- Eventually these may become conversational interfaces
Maggie Appleton discusses this pattern in her article on Command K Bars
- The name comes from the fact many apps use the ctrl/cmd k shortcut to open the command palette
Many softwares I use have some form of command palette
- Linear
- Logseq
- Visual Studio Code