In 2003, Quicksilver introduced me to the striking notion of "wu wei" as applied to software—effortless action, doing without doing, no decisions or cognition required; creates a feeling of speed. Can be a powerful design property! (e.g. iOS scrolling)
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Relatedly, I think checklists and playbooks access a weak form of this feeling—submission to a process, "becoming" the process. It can be really powerful to take something that normally requires decisions/will and to turn it into an "executable strategy."
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It's one thing I like about spaced repetition as a mechanism. Say that you’d like to study cell metabolism. Without SRS, you need to make a plan ("I study cell biology on Tuesday"), set up some trigger to help you remember the plan, and summon the will to execute it repeatedly.
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But if you have an active SRS practice, you can throw some prompts into your library and be confident that you’ll engage over time. You don’t need to decide how often you’ll study or to exert willpower to study those particular prompts—only to show up for daily SRS practice.
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This is very unlike the feeling one has when, say, maintaining an inbox, which is full of weighty decisions! Extremely un-"wu wei."
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One odd tension: SRS involves both effortlessness & diligence. You show up to your session w/o specific expectations, but you engage attentively with what's there. It's ultimately a tool for serious people; it’s about deepening your relationship with whatever you care about most.
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(For those who never saw Quicksilver, it originated (I think!) the now common "command palette" type-ahead pattern: Cmd+Space, A, M, Return to launch Activity Monitor; Cmd+Space, W, Space, bagel to search Wikipedia for "bagel"; etc)
qsapp.com/about.php
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Ah, apparently LaunchBar got there first—in 1996! twitter.com/JivaDeVoe/stat
I enjoyed QS's interface approach more but eventually switched to LaunchBar after Quicksilver stopped being actively updated.
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Replying to @andy_matuschak
I think LaunchBar originated that on NextSTEP.
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What about this program called "sh"? c.1973
It was a piece of software called a shell by Ken Thompson where you could type the name of any program and it would launch it.
You could even send results from one program into another. 🤯
Pretty crazy!
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I'll bite. It's important to understand the differences between sh's interaction model and LaunchBar/Quicksilver's. Fuzzy type-ahead producing an interactive and incremental list of options vs. discrete, one-shot tab-completion—they're very different feedback loops.
I agree, though I imagine the UX was limited by computational capabilities and not ingenuity.
At it's core: sh, LaunchBar, & Quicksilver are REPLs (read-evaluate-print-loops). What happens during those loops is significant, but I think the paradigm itself is noteworthy.
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e.g. Emacs (1976) text editor features a "M-x" command which activates a REPL capable of fuzzy matching text, suggesting programs & files.
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