Command palette search could be improved

[TristanJamesBall]

To start: I love that there's a command palette at all!

But here's an example of my user experience as a first timer.. I wanted to find out how to select a line, and I'd already noticed the command palette so

1. Open the palette
2. type "select line"
3. Get a bewildering number of results.
4. Miss that "select line" is the ninth result
5. Resort to google/tutorial/github discussions for help

To me, one of the absolute killer features of command palettes is they make complex software discoverable, but I think this failed in that

TLDR: Make the search case insensitive and use the whole words as entered as substring matches for the results - I think I would have found what I wanted with the first or second result.

1. The fact that the search is case sensitive both means I'm more likely to miss results. I get that searches on the command might need to be case-sensitive, but the description?

   • In this case it also means that the highlighted text is "...already selected, extend to next line". Given the search returned lots of results, I'm quick scanning them, which means highlighing 'selected' is unhelpful, it draws the eye, but then I'll automatically skip it because nothing is selected yet.

2. Having results that include individual letters from the words I've typed means there are lots of really low quality results, like:
   "Insert before selection (i) [insert_mode]"

   • I guess this is a side effect of how "search as you type" is being done, but I think using the whole words as search terms is much more likely to capture the intent of the search. There's just no way I type "line" and want to see "insert" as the result
   • At the very least. if there was a way to say "I've completed entering my search now" so the code could switch from "character match" to "contains word" mode I think the results would improve - but I think a plain substring match would still be better

3. The terminolgy around "extend" vs "select" is very inconsistant. I get now that you consider a cursor a single character selection, but I don't think I should need to know that to just select a line. Granted the ninth result is "Select current line" - but the 4th is the "Extend Selection to line bounds" - which to me implied that I had to be in "Select Mode" with at least a partial selection already.. I mean it's a much higher result, that must be the way you do it?

4. I'd put the hot keys in a seperate column, so they can be vertically aligned ( and possibly sorted ). Common tasks are more likely to have hot keys so being able to easily distinguish which commands have hot keys - which I think is easier with a vertically aligned field - means it's easier to find common actions, which again I think improves discoverability

   • Possibly as an easier to implement option, putting the hotkey first, or a blank of the same width, would at least give the vertical alignment