Forem: Abhay Raj Singh

Inkscape: Command Palette merged!

Abhay Raj Singh — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 07:28:16 +0000

Background

I enrolled in Google Summer of Code this year with Inkscape as my mentor organization. I proposed to implement the Command palette and the Macros (more on that later).

About

The 'Command Palette' feature is finally merged in Inkscape's master branch, it has still a long way to go, but now you can easily contribute and try it out. It is currently available in version 1.1-alpha, and it may even land in version 1.1.
So what even is command palette?

Command Palette

If I had to summarize it in a sentence

The Command Palette is an Access Point with a text interface.

Woah! No jargon!

You can do things by typing.

What does it do? Search and/or Execute.

Why though?

To Maximize the speed and efficiency of the user and to minimize frustration and boredom.

Final goals

Search for actions and execute them.
Search for recent files and open/import them.
Remember previous commands and their parameters.
Execute Python code.
Execute shell commands.

What are actions?

Actions are the backbone of everything you do in Inkscape.

Rotating an object is an action.
Zooming in and out are actions.

Current status

Don't try to be an oracle, tell me what it can do now!

Search for actions and execute them.
Search for recent files and open/import them.
Remember previous commands and their parameters.

Well, that's it for now, more features will be added in the future.

How to use?

NOTE: only available in Inkscape 1.1-dev or 1.1-alpha

To open the Command Palette, press ?. You are greeted with a beautiful (not really) dialog.

If you can't stand this beauty (not really), you can close it by

Clicking on canvas or any object on the canvas.
Pressing esc.
Pressing ? again.

Testing it out

Type snap and now you can easily find the snapping option you want without hovering over every icon.
Select an object, type rotate, and then press enter, put in the angle you want to rotate the object by, and press enter again.
Type a recent filename you worked on (before restart). There will be two options: open and import. Open just opens it in a new document in a new window, while import, imports the image in the current document.

Scroll through the operations available when you open the command palette.

Some operations are missing

Inkscape is moving from, verbs to actions, and thus not all features of Inkscape are available through the command palette.

History

The command palette remembers the last commands you performed. To access them press the up key when Command Palette is in focus.
Press the down key when on the most recent command to go back from history mode to search mode.

Many actions that you use take input or parameter, for example, rotate action takes angle, transform action takes distances to move an object by, in x and y directions.
Parameters of actions are also remembered (doesn't work in 1.1-alpha), so when you're asked degrees for rotate, you can just press the up key until you find the previously used value you wanted.

TODO

Porting more verbs to actions.
Favourites.
Set shortcuts from the command palette.
Display the menu location of an action.
Better searching algorithm.
Input descriptions
Cleanliness: many actions aren't useful for GUI users and hence should not appear in the command palette.

...and many more. It's still a new feature, written by a kid during summer, so there's a lot of room for improvement.

Contributing

Make a feature request or report a bug in the Inbox bug tracker.
Help in making it more intuitive in the UX discussion channel
Want to code? Get in touch on the Inkscape Chat, ping @rathod-sahaab, maybe I can help you get up to speed, or reach out on Twitter @swayambhu_dev.

Inkscape Command Palette: GSoC 2020

Abhay Raj Singh — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 15:21:03 +0000

Command Palette

Command Palette strives to be, in simple terms an Access Point. The interface it chooses is text.

Some features that we have included(and planned to include) in the command palette are:

Actions Search: Inkscape has a plethora of features and it becomes hard to remember where they are in deeply nested menus. A large number of operations also create difficulty in assigning shortcuts for all of them. This feature helps to search and execute all actions(operations) specifically Gio::Actions, search files, preferences, and others.
Python execution: This feature depends(blocking) on Integrating Python into Inkscape, Merge Request. This useful for the times when you need some programming goodness for technical accuracy in your designs. For example: Plotting 2D density of an equations
Shell execution: This is more of a developer and CLI users oriented feature, to test that commands have the desired effect.

Progress

30 June 2020

Command Palette is now capable of searching and executing actions. Actions are the future of how Inkscape will do things/operations. There are close to 100 as I write. Though it's still a long way to go converting all verbs to actions we will get there.

Let me give you a tour of how to use Command Palette.

The default key to toggle CP is ? (question mark). Thanks to Maren Hachmann for the idea.

Once you press ?. A rectangular box with rounded corners appears on the canvas. (comment below if you like/dislike this design also suggest other locations/design for CP)

Let's start with anatomy.

Anatomy

The most annoying part (Ctrl + `) is a placeholder for shortcuts of the actions. Placeholder because currently, only verbs predecessors to actions have shortcuts.

In the bold fonts are action names. Currently, an action's name is a verb name of that action. They aren't translatable but I am working and soon will be replaced.

Action name is preceded by the group that action belongs to. Example, File, Dialog, Transform, etc.

Below the action name is the description for what action does.

That's not all let's see what invisible.

Let's enable the options

After restarting Inkscape this is how Command Palette looks like.

The name in small size letters will always be in English, this is to enable tutors of different Interface language to help others.

The cryptic name in far-right is the full action name helpful for CLI users.

Usage

You type to search and click to execute. Press Esc key at any time to close CP. Currently, searching relies on a substring search algorithm.
TODO: I'm working on a fuzzy search algorithm for this.

Alternatively, you can navigate between suggestions with Tab and Shift + Tab or arrow key and press enter to execute.

The top row is automatically highlighted when searching so when you press enter/return/linefeed.
NOTE: some bug causes this feature to require 2 presses and highlighting only work if the same row is on top for 2 letters pressed during a search.

Arguments

We ask action parameters/data as depicted below

Due to restriction of Gio::Actions we, for now, can only ask for one parameter.

TODO:

Add better(snippet like) support for multiple params
Better descriptions/context of parameter

Links:
GitLab Merge Request
GitLab UX issue
GitLab Technical issue

Theme: Flat Remix

Please comment below any Ideas/Questions you can think of.
Decency level: *Roast me