As a tip for macOS users who maybe don’t know this: Theres a similar feature in every macOS app when you click the “Help” menubar entry of an app and enter text into the search field there.
I don’t really use this as a command palette, but it’s so good for finding specific bits of functionality in an app.
It’s also one of the reasons I’m a big fan of global menubars: they act as a sort of index of everything an app can do, and the menubar is always present anyway there’s no point in devs not utilizing them.
A new incarnation of the old ubuntu unity all over again. Actually a kind liked how unity worked on ubuntu 12.04, I could have many files open on gedit and easily switch them, it was easy to find plugins on gimp without needing to search the menus... Don't know why it didn't stay.
This doesn't support gtk4 afaik and last commit if from 2017, seems abandoned.
This kind of functionality is awesome. I have visual tracking problems for some reason. I get tunnelvision frequently, I often lose track of the mouse, and it's just generally hard for me to find things by physically scanning for them with my eyes.
One of the things that I love about text/search-driven interfaces (like my terminal, global search tools (Spotlight, KRunner, whatever), Emacs, etc.) is that the information I need to see comes to ME. I fix my eyes on one part of the screen, and I know that exactly whatever I need to consider will appear exactly there. It's great!
I really hope something like this can become a more standard/expected feature in most GUI environments.
- Editing shortcuts within the menus is not really discoverable, except by accident, it's too easy to accidentally change a shortcut that way and screw up your program, and the UI around saving/loading/resetting them is not good
- Tearoff/multicolumn menus were seen as a workaround for programs that have too many huge and/or nested menus, where something like a toolbar or a command palette would be more appropriate
I remember building something similar about ten years ago for Windows using the accessibility APIs to extract menus from applications.
To my chagrin, a great many applications, including those shipping with Windows (even the explorer, iirc) and almost everything using fancy UIs or various toolkits (GTK, Tk and Java apps I think, Qt worked) don't expose their menus through them, which made it pretty useless.
Great idea! I must check it out when I'll be in front of computer.
I lately wonder what amaizing tools could be written using accessibility APIs, but presenting things graphically. AFAIU this uses introspection abilities of GTK, but the idea is similar I guess.
This probably uses Gtk introspection to enumerate the main menu of the application.
> Documentation on GTK+ modules is essentially nonexisting. Without gtkparasite and gnome-globalmenu to learn from, it would have been a lot harder to get this project off the ground.
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> Nemo vir est qui mundum non reddat meliorem
Going of my very unused latin knowledge. "Nemo vir est" = "There is no man", "qui mundum non reddat meliorem" -> "There is no man, who doesn't return betterment to the world" (had to look meliorem up tho)
Newer Gtk apps that use app menus with GAction and GMenuModel should work fine, and will be forward-compatible with other similar tools, since those will export the menu over d-bus.
>> How does this work exactly? Are there anythings that an app needs to do for it to work fully?
> Plotinus brings that power to every application on your system (that is, to those that use the GTK+ 3 toolkit). It automatically extracts all available commands by introspecting a running application, instantly adapting to UI changes and showing only relevant actions. Using Plotinus requires no modifications to the application itself!
That quote is present in (originates from ?) the movie "Kingdom Of Heaven", in the workshop of the main character Balian, where it is translated as "What man is a man who does not make the world better?".
