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by mucholove 2166 days ago
So much bull crap stuff. The fastest way to find something is to search for it.

And...search for a menu item is a 2nd class feature on the OS. I wish I could click a text field on the menu bar and find stuff. I wish the actions were indexed with the documentation. Oh—and I wish that the keyboard shortcut for that was standard. Not on my Mac, but I’m pretty sure that I had to type it in from a Mac productivity magazine.
2 comments
jodrellblank 2166 days ago
> So much bull crap stuff. The fastest way to find something is to search for it.

Faster to search for "save" or press Ctrl+S? Faster to search for "save" or click the save icon at the top of the screen? Searching is slower, clearly. Even if searching was always faster, it doesn't refute "bull crap stuff" because there was no claim that the Ribbon is the fastest full stop, it's a balance of discoverable and usable; search requires you to know the right search terms to use, and it suffers the problem of the old Office self-customizing menus - the results aren't always in the same predictable order - and if what you want is not in the top few results, you don't know if the feature doesn't exist, does exist by another name, or is in the hundreds of results you aren't going to read. And it has no way to surface features and make them discoverable.

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int_19h 2166 days ago
You search the first couple times you need something, then you memorize where it is in the menu. If you keep using it repeatedly, you'll learn the shortcut, since it's displayed prominently every time the menu drops down.
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chipotle_coyote 2166 days ago
On the Mac search for a menu item is almost always available as the very first item in the "Help" menu, and the keyboard shortcut for it is both standard and fairly easily guessable: Command + ? (e.g., Command + Shift + / on a keyboard where "?" is the shifted version of "/").

Not every program implements a Help menu, and not every program that implements a Help menu implements the standard shortcut. But in my experience, a large majority do. (Nearly all native apps do, but even some Electron apps get this right. Visual Code does both, for instance, and Slack at least has the Help menu with the search field in the first place.)

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