Chromium

This screenshot shows me simply typing “ubi” to find the Ubiquity site for the link above. Not only are there two different links to the correct Ubiquity site, there’s also a second Google search hint for the full word, a search for recent history that contains those three letters, and even a Ubisoft link. Additionally, when I was just at “ub” Ubuntu was shown. This happens with just about every site I want to visit. Sites that I frequently visit are higher on the list and come up even faster.

This shot shows me typing in my wife’s website with just one letter. It also shows two other sites I frequently go to, and neither of those is a favorite. This means I can just type “p-<enter>” to go to her site.

I’m finding that the more I use it, the more I’m finding most of my sites appearing directly on the bar by typing just three to four letters. I also like that I can type “ama-<space>-<search term>” and be searching for something on Amazon. I configured “ama” as the keyword rather than the full “amazon.com” that it automatically configures when it finds a site to add to the search providers. It’s faster for me and just a single “a” goes to Amazon for me now, should I choose to go there directly to search or browse.

How’s that for a modern command line?

Vista

Things are also similar when using Vista and the windows button on my keyboard. I don’t bother to organize my “All Programs” menu anymore because the search finds whatever I need, from the program I want to launch to the file I want to open.  This first shot shows me with the ability to launch “Notepad” after typing just “<win>-notep” ”“ pretty fast, but you’re probably used to also just doing “<win>-r-notepad” and having the auto-complete there fill it in quickly ”“ maybe even quicker.

This next example, though, shows launching something that you couldn’t launch easily from the Run dialog. I’ve typed just “panel” to be able to launch the Windows Control Panel. You can also type something within the control panel, such as “device” to quickly get to the device manager. (Note: I’ve seen a lot of folks complain about how Vista has moved various configuration options around and now they’re hard to find. Well, they’ve been moved around, sure. However, they’re much easier to find now because they all just appear from the search bar. For me, that’s an improvement and they’re far faster to get to and with much less clicking.)

Finally, the search also brings up documents. (I’ve been hiding those not just to hide my docs, but also because the actual window with results is pretty tall and wouldn’t fit here very well.) In this example, I’ve simply typed “QST” to find all of the documents with those three letters. The PDFs shown are articles I’ve downloaded from the ARRL’s new service to provide electronic articles to members. Now I can easily find them all with just three letters.

Got a document you’re working on frequently? Put three unique (or even two) letters in the name and you can quickly find it and open it. Vista will even search the tags on the file, so you don’t have to actually change the file name. The shot shown is one where I’ve typed just “qrp” and both a word document and an image are shown where “qrp” only exists in the file tags (editable via Explorer in Vista). Also shown is this very document ”“ I didn’t get the screen shot until after it was automatically saved.  Apparently, it also searches inside documents of certain types. (Note: And yes, I used “QRP” on purpose.)

If you know your item will always be at the top or the only result you don’t even have to wait for the search to complete to hit enter and have it launched or opened. This allows me to launch things really quickly, but occasionally something new ends up at the top and the wrong thing is launched. Use of unique strings here is useful.

How’s that for a modern command line?

Future

It’s my opinion that these types of quick keyboard shortcuts will become even more powerful as indexing becomes better, machines become faster, and natural language interpretation is improved. For now, though, these features are quite amazing and can be great time savers if used well.

Warning: Becoming reliant on these features on your own machine will make you quickly frustrated when they either don’t work on another machine or the results are slightly different such that your super-short completions launch something completely unexpected. It’s still worthwhile, though. :)

Now, go out and enjoy the modern command line in a GUI world!