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Invoke · What to do? · it follows

Element 9

9●›
C
Command

Say a verb from a fixed list.

shortcut · command line · palette

First known

Opened

1961CTSS at MIT's Computation Center (Corbató): commands typed at a console.

See also: Sketchpad's push buttons such as 'erase' and 'move', 1963.

First public demonstrations November 1961.

Someone opened the dated document itself. The source.

  • ReadingValue

Specimen № 9a — operate freely

Play the chord.

Fig. 9a — Keyboard Shortcut

000 readings · idle

Anatomy of Keyboard Shortcut

  1. 01Hold
    You
    Presses a modifier.
    It
    Usually shows nothing. Better systems show which chords are waiting.
  2. 02Strike
    You
    Adds the key.
    It
    Fires the command, with no pointer travel at all.
  3. 03Confirm
    You
    Looks for the effect.
    It
    Shows the result. Some systems flash the menu item, so the mapping teaches itself.
  4. 04Learn
    You
    Does it again, and again.
    It
    Nothing new. The change happens in the person, from recall to reflex.

Phases light as the specimen above registers them. The dark ones are the ones it can't sense.

Lineage

Text editors at Xerox PARC in the 1970s bound commands to keys. Apple's Lisa and Macintosh fixed the ones everyone knows, including undo, cut, copy, and paste, in 1983 and 1984.

Descends fromAn origin
Keyboard Shortcut
Gave rise to

Under delegation

Dissolves

  1. Survives
  2. Mutates
  3. Dissolves

Shortcuts traded discoverability for speed. A command palette bought some discoverability back, and a prompt buys back the rest: say what you mean, in your own words, and the system finds the verb. What dissolves is the memorizing. What should survive is the speed, and no prompt is as fast as a chord yet.

Becomes

Down the Invoke column

  1. it followsCCommand
  2. it targetsEqEquip
  3. it remembersRRun
  4. it connectsAsAssign
  5. it guessesTeTell
  6. it actsDlDelegate

Read down and Command gets heavier: each step is the same act, on a machine that keeps track of more.

Bodies

The act stays put while the hardware changes. These are some of the forms Command takes.

  • shortcut
  • command line
  • palette

From the 2021 table

These were tiles of their own. On this table each is a form of Command, and each old address lands here.

  • Keyboard ShortcutIsotopeThe same act in another body.Operate ↑
  • Shortcut ChordIsotopeThe same act in another body.Operate ↑
  • SummonIsotopeThe same act in another body.Operate ↑
  • Voice CommandIsotopeThe same act in another body.