Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by barrkel 2310 days ago
Menus are still superior to help search for feature discovery because they are an explicit navigable enumeration of the feature set surface; if help doesn't have the right synonyms, you'll be stuck, whereas menu item listing might hint at different ways to accomplish the same end goal.
2 comments

FYI the search box in the help menu searches the rest of the menu bar. It's great for feature discovery if you think something might exist but don't know where it is.
Mac menus list the keyboard shortcuts for menu items right next to the items.
So do menus on all desktop platforms I've used.

My point is that menus work as a way of exposing functionality and making it discoverable through enumeration in a way that contextual UIs and fashionable techniques of the day don't.

I'm pretty sure that visible shortcuts are a CUA thing. They date way back - even text-mode menu-driven DOS apps had them, e.g. all the Borland IDEs.