On Nov 8, 2011, at 12:52 AM, philostein wrote: > Howard, you said in your manual the result of ⌘⇧letter Commands was sometimes > unclear. Probably because the same Action would often come up coincidentally > for letter and ⇧letter making it unclear that there was a difference between > the two.
I wrote: "To make it faster you can type the letter with the ⇧⌘ modifiers from the first pane. So to edit Ashish’s contact entry I would activate Quicksilver, type a to bring up her entry and then type ⇧⌘E to have Quicksilver execute the command. This only allows you to use one letter to identify the action and has the same risk that you have to know what action will be run, but if you do, it can be convenient." What I meant about it being confusing was that a (novice) user would need to know what the default action for a (single) letter was with no visual hints (like a results list) and no opportunity to check before the command is run. In this case that E was for Edit Contact. It's more confusing because the default changes based on the type of the object in the first pane. For a URL E might run Email To... I'm surprised the whole Actions section is still TODO but I do remember being surprised when I learned that actions worked differently from objects, that the matching algorithm wasn't really used and that actions were ranked in the preferences (which I note at the end of the matching algorithm section). I know that OS X confuses the issue. Shortcuts in menus are always shown as uppercase letters even though you type the lowercase counterpart and only use the ⇧ if it's explicitly indicated. Quicksilver does the same at the top of the results list (at least in Bezel) showing what you typed in all uppercase even when you type in all lowercase. Quicksilver's (apparently current) behavior of allowing different defaults for different cases of action strikes me as inconsistent because action names are case insensitive and QS's matching algorithm is also case-insensitive (thankfully). The action named "Edit Contact" appears if I type e or E. In the Action Preferences I see the same list of actions (in the same order) whether I search there for e or E. Also, (as you noted) in the actions results lists if I right click the menu choice says 'Set as Default for "E'"' even if I type 'e'. If there was UI to examine and modify the saved the mnemonics, abbreviations and defaults then I'd be more accepting. But without it, this seems like an easy way to confuse things without that much gain. In fact what is the potential benefit? You can't type two different quick shortcuts using ⌘⇧ because you can't type a lowercase letter with that combination. In the case of "Capitalized keys modify action in command window" you can't type a lowercase letter to run a different command. I suppose in normal usage in the second pane you could match differently for upper and lowercase, but does QS actually do that? I guess I do care. :) (And note, I'm just talking about what QS should do here, whether this is a bug or a feature. I'm not discussing or qualified to discuss the potential risk of fixing this breaking something else, I leave that to the developers to consider and prioritize.) Howard
