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Comment by ddingus | Hacker News Reader

My favorite compromise is a search that takes a user right to the button, and or can initiate whatever it is.

Each search is an opportunity to build experience needed to use search less.

The buttons are there for those who want to run fast and or efficiently.

Doing that well is a lot of work, but it also delivers high value.

Going search only can be super lean, which has to be compelling. Everything costs something though, and the cost here is no user becomes adept. There is a permanently fairly high Ccost of interaction.

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> My favorite compromise is a search that takes a user right to the button, and or can initiate whatever it is.

This is how MacOS X's help menu search box has worked for over a decade, and it's brilliant. Type in a search and it shows you every menu item that matches, and rolling down the list shows you live where each menu item is.

I wish Spotlight search was similar - showing paths more readily, and making it easier to open the folder that contains the item that you want to look at.

I don't know how you're supposed to discover this, but highlighting a file result in Spotlight and holding the Command key will show you where it is, and Command+Enter will open the parent directory in Finder with the file highlighted

That's the problem. Not very discoverable, but pretty efficient for those in the know.

Goddamn. I've been an MacOS user, and supported MacOS users, for ages and I had no idea this existed. Thank you!

I first encountered that method in NX CAD.

Siemens is an old company who tends to get investments right. Apple uses Siemens design software, so who knows? Perhaps Apple had influence?

Great implementation!

At the time, I was in a heavy pre-sales role and would make the help system a part of the demo. I am pretty sure everyone saw high value there.

And talk about complex, with depth, subtlety! That program demands more than mere buttons can deliver!

I first encountered that method in NX CAD.

Siemens is an old company who tends to get investments right. Apple uses Siemens design software, so who knows? Perhaps Apple had influence?

Great implementation!

At the time, I was in a heavy pre-sales role and would make the help system a part of the demo. I am pretty sure everyone saw high value there.

And talk about complex, with depth, subtlety! That program demands more than mere buttons can deliver!

And my own ability to use the tool improved dramatically. I have 20 plus years doing sales, service, and support. OTC, SDRC, UGS (Both those two now Siemens, Soludworks, Solid Edge...)

Hands down, these methods crush anything else I have seen.

Some of our inspiration definitely comes from CAD, NX CAD and Fusion. IMO the work they've put into making a mountain of functionality useful and intuitive to a new user has paid off.

And that's the functionality in front and planned to be favored by users. Many older features are available to those who know how to ask for them.

Also, in terms of the geometry, how the system builds models, the feature version is stored with the features, and that version will build models in newer software, until migrated forward by a user.

It's very complex.

Thanks for this! We're definitely working it into our system. It's always good to have multiple paths when possible, so a menu that connects to search and backwards might be quite useful to introduce users to features, but tie in muscle memory once they are used to it.

I use VS Code, which offers a keybinding interface. But when I use the command search, the cost is really low, because most of my searches require zero, one, or two characters to disambiguate.

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