Discussion: What Command Palettes do you use?

[Emily Ditchfield]

Hi Everyone! 

Thanks for joining our Command Palette Beta Group! We want to learn more about you and your use of command palettes. We'll be posting a discussion topic every week! This week our question is:

What other command palettes do you use? What do you like about them?

I use the Arc Browser command palette a lot. It’s inbuilt into a shortcut that I’m used to (cmd + t) and I love that it will switch me to an already opened tab instead of opening the same URL in a new tab.

[Anya Nagarajan]

I love the Arc command palette.

Lately, I have been using Slack's command palette. It helps me quickly navigate to different channels (I am in a lot of them) and for searching specific conversations.

I love their 'Jump to' any channel or direct messaging feature! 

[Steven Klassen]

Visual Studio Code command palettes are a staple of my day-to-day. I would be lost without it, since there could have been thousands of menu options buried somewhere. In the era of ChatGPT translating simple language into results, I love being able to simply type a couple of words and have the program prompt or jump me into the menu/actions that I wanted.

As little time and mental effort as possible between first thought and implemented action.

(Hmmm... Definitely curious about trying out the Arc Browser specifically for their command palette.)

[Anya Nagarajan]

Hi @Steven Klassen that's great to know. What type of commands do you frequently use in VS Code? 

[Steven Klassen]

Lately it has been a lot of file setup commands or extension triggers: changing file language type, parsing/stringify-ing JSON, loading certain extension pages (graphs, visualizations, comparisons), or even just command discovery by typing a keyword and seeing the related commands. I often don't know what I'm missing.

Sidenote -- That's why I haven't used Jira's command palette too often yet: there isn't much to discover. As a QA engineer, most of the actions I take are on the current issue page: assign myself, add a comment, open related pull requests, click pass/fail to trigger the next workflow step... I don't do much issue administration (where I suspect the palette might be more useful) and I already have a shortcut to jump to the search bar. Happy to be enlightened, here!

[Anya Nagarajan]

Thanks @Steven Klassen. Interesting points around command discovery! We are working towards adding more issue actions in the palette (like adding a comment). It's an interesting point around the shortcut to jump to the search bar. What are you typically searching for, and would you prefer an option to search in the palette instead? 

[Steven Klassen]

I'm generally looking for 1 of 3 things:

1. An issue I know exists, but I can't remember the exact name or a clear description, so I'm typing in a couple keywords
2. Discovering whether or not a bug has already been reported by searching related words / error messages
3. One of our epics that holds a particular set of features or bugs (we use some epics to group together types of known issues)

I don't know how an issue search in the palette could be different than the search bar. Right now I would usually press "/" instead of "Cmd+K" and another key.

[Luke Ellery]

Yes I'm using the Arc one a lot. So easy to start notes with it.It super helpful when something just crosses my mind and I need to quickly start note taking. 

Also feel you with using Slack's command palette Anya, though I gotta say sometimes I get a bit confused by Slack's command palette... It has a lot going on. Don't @ me haha.

[Justice Caban]

Hi, super excited to see this feature built up more. I'm a big fan of the VS Code command palette, I've been using Arc for its command palette but the best one I've come across is Raycast. 

I would love to see forge integration so we can build more functionality into the command palette internally!