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kando-menu
kando
TypeScript2023–2024
kando-menu / kando

kando

🌸 Do things with utmost efficiency.

6Distinct people
8Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
6.6KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

🌸 Do things with utmost efficiency.

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Where it is used

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What people are saying

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month8 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2023-06-02 15:22:10 UTC to 2024-08-06 00:17:34 UTC.

0122023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsJun 20232023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 commentsJan 20242024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 commentsAug 2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Jun 20232023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Jul 20232023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20232023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC110
Sep 20232023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20232023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20232023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Dec 20232023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC110
Feb 20242024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Mar 20242024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20242024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20242024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20242024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Jul 20242024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20242024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

8 sources
I think they might be accurately rated. If they were underrated perhaps they would have flourished after iPhone/Android came out (more for the coolness factor than the utility factor, since on mobile they have the issue of something being blocked by your finger, which I think limits it but isn't a dealbreaker). However, donut chart menus haven't been catching on. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39206966 I think they're cool, and that's about it, that the Fitts's Law benefit is too small (as argued in the thread I linked), and that the coolness factor fades fairly quickly for most (though I still want some sometimes). Edit: if it's straightforward to port https://github.com/kando-menu/kando from electron to Tauri that might be interesting. https://github.com/kando-menu/kando/issues/410
In Show HN: Pie Menu – a radial menu for macOS
Simon Schneegan's "Kandu" cross platform pie menus, as well as his older "Fly-Pie" and "Gnome-Pie" projects, let you create and edit your own pie menus with a WYSIWYG drag-and-drop direct manipulation interface. Kando: The Cross-Platform Pie Menu (github.com/kando-menu) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39206966 https://github.com/kando-menu/kando A first glimpse at Kando's Menu Editor! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLJ1-z9i3cI Development Update for Kando's Menu Editor! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIF6k9OxQ80 Item labels in Fly-Pie! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yyl5nMPI1f0 Fly-Pie 10: A new Clipboard Menu, proper touch support & much more! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGXtckqhEIk Fly-Pie 7: GNOME Shell 40+ and a new WYSIWYG Menu Editor! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRT3O9-H5Xs Gnome-Pie https://vimeo.com/30618179 Gnome-
Read the rest
In How to make a better default Firefox UI
Agreed! ;) I know you're joking about "ONLY", but actually, linear drop-down menus are just an edge case of pie menus with multiple items in only one direction: down. So you can also make drop-down, -up, -left, -right, and other direction menus with a decent pie menu editor, like the Blender pie menu editor add-on. Pie menus are much more useful if users can edit and create their own, especially in feature-rich extensible configurable applications that different people use in different ways like Gimp and Blender. Blender has great pie menu support, and there's a nice pie menu editor add-on, but it really needs a built-in WYSIWYG pie menu editor, supporting on-the-fly direct manipulation WYSIWYG drag-and-drop pie menu editing, like Simon Schneegans's brilliant Gnome-Pie and Fly-Pie. By "direct manipulation WYSIWYG drag-and-drop" I mean tha
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t ideally you should be able to put any existing menu into edit mode on the fly, and edit the circular pie, linear, or hybrid layout directly by dragging items around to different slices, instead of with an indirect linear scrolling list or outline in a separate window. You need to be able directly and immediately edit them as they will appear to the user, not as some abstract linear tree outline (or god forbid, raw xml). Pie Menu Development for Blender: https://devtalk.blender.org/t/pie-menu-development-for-blend... Blender Pie Menu Editor: https://blendermarket.com/products/pie-menu-editor Gnome-Pie (wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnome-Pie Gnome-Pie (github): https://schneegans.github.io/gnome-pie Gnome-Pie 0.6.1: https://vimeo.com/125339537 Fly-Pie 7: GNOME Shell 40+ and a new WYSIWYG Menu Editor! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRT3O9-H5Xs Fly-Pie 10: A new Clipboard Menu, proper touch support & much more! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGXtckqhEIk And Simon's new project, Kando: Kando - An Open Source, Cross-Platform Pie Menu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdfnUDMO9k Follow and support the project on Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/schneegans Kando on GitHub: https://github.com/kando-menu/kando I also love the beautiful Trace and Coral menus he designed for his Bachelor thesis 11 years ago: https://schneegans.github.io/news/2012/10/10/bachelor-thesis The Trace-Menu: https://vimeo.com/51073078 The Coral-Menu: https://vimeo.com/51072812 More of his great stuff: https://schneegans.github.io/ A retrospective of my 35 years of work with pie menus: Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective (2018): https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1 >Steve Jobs Thought Pie Menus Sucked: “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!” >On October 25, 1988, I gave Steve Jobs a demo of pie menus, NeWS, UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the Educom conference in Washington DC. His reaction was to jump up and down, point at the screen, and yell “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!” >I tried explaining how we’d performed an experiment proving pie menus were faster than linear menus, but he insisted the liner menus in NeXT Step were the best possible menus ever. >But who was I to rain on his parade, two weeks after the first release of NeXT Step 0.8? (Up to that time, it was the most hyped piece of vaporware ever, and doubters were wearing t-shirts saying “NeVR Step”!) Even after he went back to Apple, Steve Jobs never took a bite of Apple Pie Menus, the forbidden fruit. There’s no accounting for taste! The ideas behind pie menus have actually been around for even longer than that, since at least 1969: Flight of the PIXIE - Yuja Wang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI >Dedication and Thanks to: Neil E. Wiseman, Heinz U. Lemke, John O. Hiles, PIXIE: A New Approach to Graphical Man-Machine Communication, Proceedings of 1969 CAD Conference Southampton IEEE Conference Publication 51, pp. 463–471. David Chapman, Cambridge University Library. Remixing and Synchronization with AfterEffects by Don Hopkins. >This film demonstrates an early graphical user interface in use. It was made in 1969 to accompany a paper entitled “PIXIE: a new approach to graphical man-machine communication” presented at the 1969 CAD Conference held in Southampton. https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/library/archives.html PIXIE ran on a PDP-7 with a Type 340 CRT vector display with a light pen, networked with the Titan at Cambridge University, and was one of the earliest examples of a network distributed gui application, developed by Neil E. Wiseman, Heinz U. Lemke, and John O. Hiles. https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/rainbow/people/neilw.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(1963_computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-7 David S H Rosenthal: Kids Today Have No Idea: https://blog.dshr.org/2018/11/kids-today-have-no-idea.html
In Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?
How about taking another step back, and having a browser that functions as a scriptable user-customizable editable window manager like HyperCard? Run the web browser directly on the hardware, and implement the desktop window manager with that, in a way that the whole system is a scriptable integrated development environment. Then it's easy to implement tabbed windows, pie menus, and user-editable HyperCard-like interfaces. Here's a big step in the right direction of supporting pie menus on the desktop: Simon Schneegans's "Kando" project aims to implement cross-platform pie menus on the desktop. Simon implemented the beautiful "Pie Fly" Gnome shell extension and WYSIWYG pie menu editor, so I am really looking forward to what he does with other desktop interfaces! Introducing: Kando: https://ko-fi.com/post/Introducing-Ken-Do-L3L7L0FQ2 https
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://github.com/kando-menu/kando >Kando will be a pie menu for the desktop. It will be highly customizable and will allow you to create your own menus and actions. For instance, you can use it to control your music player, to open your favorite websites or to simulate shortcuts. It will be available for Windows, Linux and maybe macOS. Fly-Pie: https://github.com/Schneegans/Fly-Pie >Fly-Pie is an extension for GNOME Shell which lets you open marking menus via keyboard shortcuts. And — to the best of my knowledge — it is the first GNOME Shell extension with achievements! >You can use it to launch applications, simulate hotkeys, open URLs and much more. It features a continuous learning curve which lets you gradually lift-off from a grumpie menu rookie to a snappie menu pielot. (You got it? Like pilot, but with a ). Once you opened a marking menu, you can seamlessly transition between three alternative selection modes: >Point-and-Click: Select items by clicking on them or anywhere in the corresponding wedges. >Marking-Mode: Select items by drawing gestures. To do this, click anywhere and drag your mouse. Pausing or making a turn selects the currently dragged item. >Turbo-Mode: You can also "draw" gestures while holding Ctrl, Shift, or Alt without having to press your mouse button! This is especially useful when you opened the menu with a shortcut involving such a modifier. Fly-Pie 7: GNOME Shell 40+ and a new WYSIWYG Menu Editor!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRT3O9-H5Xs Fly-Pie 10: A new Clipboard Menu, proper touch support & much more!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGXtckqhEIk I've written about reinventing scriptable HyperCard-like window managers with pie menus and tabbed windows before: SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS)): https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-go... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13817649 >At Sun we experimented with implementing an X11 window manager in NeWS. We didn't have transparency at the time (1992), but we did support shaped windows! >The NeWS window manager supported cool stuff (for both X11 and NeWS windows!) like rooms, virtual scrolling desktops, tabbed windows, pie menus, was easily extensible and deeply customisable in PostScript, and ran locally in the window server so it could respond instantly to input events, lock the input queue and provide feedback and manipulate windows immediately without causing any context switches or dealing with asynchronous locking, unlocking and event handling. You'd never lose a keystroke or click when switching between applications, for example. [...] And here's how I think you should design a programmable "window manager" these days -- but it would be much more than just a window manager! It would be great for integrating legacy desktop and mobile applications into VR, for example! >aQuery -- Like jQuery for Accessibility http://donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/AQuery >Don asks Peter Korn: Hey I would love to bounce an idea off of you! I didn't realize how much work you've done in accessibility. >There is a window manager for the Mac called Slate, that is extensible in JavaScript -- it makes a hidden WebView and uses its JS interpreter by extending it with some interfaces to the app to do window management, using the Mac Accessibility API. >So I wanted to make pie menus for it, and thought of a good approach: make the hidden WebView not so hidden, but in the topmost layer of windows, covering all the screens, with a transparent background, that shows the desktop through anywhere you don't draw html. >Then just make pie menus with JavaScript, which I've done. Works like a charm! >THEN the next step I would like to do is this: >aQuery -- like jQuery, but for selecting, querying and manipulating Mac app user interfaces via the Accessibility framework and protocols. >So you can write jQuery-like selectors that search for and select Accessibility objects, and then it provides a convenient high level API for doing all kinds of stuff with them. So you can write higher level plugin widgets with aQuery that use HTML with jQuery, or even other types of user interfaces like voice recognition/synthesis, video tracking, augmented reality, web services, etc! >For example, I want to click on a window and it will dynamically configure jQuery Pie Menus with the commands in the menu of a live Mac app. Or make a hypercard-like user interface builder that lets people drag buttons or commands out of Mac apps into their own stacks, and make special purpose simplified guis for controlling and integrating Mac apps. >Does that sound crazy? I think it just might work! Implement the aQuery "selector engine" and heavy lifting in Objective C so that it runs really fast, and presents a nice high level useful interface to JavaScript. [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29105919 >>Would you mind to share your opinion on Wayland with us? >Thanks for asking! Hold my bong. ;) [lots of opinions omitted, see link above...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22829690 >>Simula: A VR window manager for Linux [...] >Soon after the invention of the movie camera, there was a "genera" of films that consisted of nothing but pointing a movie camera at a stage, and filming a play in one shot. >That's the classic example of using a new technology to emulate an old technology, without taking advantage of the unique advantages of the new technology, before the grammar and language of film had been invented. >Simply projecting desktop user interfaces designed for flat 2D screens and mice into VR is still in the "novelty show" age, like filming staged plays written for a theater, without any editing, shots, or film grammar. >VR window managers are just a stop-gap backwards-compatibility bridge, while people work on inventing a grammar and language of interactive VR and AR user interfaces, and re-implement all the desktop and mobile applications from the ground up so they're not merely usable but actually enjoyable and aesthetically pleasing to use in VR. >The current definition of "window manager," especially as it applies to X-Windows desktops, tightly constrains how we think and what we expect of user interface and application design. We need something much more flexible and extensible. Unfortunately X-Windows decades ago rejected the crucially important ideas behind NeWS and AJAX, that the window manager should be open-ended and dynamically extensible with downloadable code, which is the key to making efficient, deeply integrated user interfaces. >For example, the "Dragon Naturally Speaking" speech synthesis and recognition system has "dragonfly", a Python-based "speech manager" that is capable of hooking into existing unmodified desktop applications, and scripting custom speech based user interfaces. >Another more ambitious example is Morgan Dixon's work on Prefab, that screen-scrapes the pixels of desktop apps, and uses pattern recognition and composition to remix and modify them. This is like cinematographers finally discovering they can edit films, cut and splice shots together, overlay text and graphics and pictures-in-pictures and adjacent frames. But Prefab isn't built around a scripting language like dragonfly, NeWS or AJAX. >Here's some stuff I've written about the direction that user interfaces should take to move beyond the antique notion of "window managers", and enables much deeper integration and accessibility and alternative input and output methods. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14182061 >Glad to see people are still making better window managers! [...] I think extensibility and accessibility are extremely important for window managers. [...] I'd like to take that idea a lot further, so I wrote up some ideas about programming window management, accessibility, screen scraping, pattern recognition and automation in JavaScript. [...] Check out Morgan Dixon's and James Fogarty's amazing work on user interface customization with Prefab, about which they've published several excellent CHI papers: [...] >Imagine if every interface was open source. Any of us could modify the software we use every day. Unfortunately, we don't have the source. >Prefab realizes this vision using only the pixels of everyday interfaces. This video shows the use of Prefab to add new functionality to Adobe Photoshop, Apple iTunes, and Microsoft Windows Media Player. Prefab represents a new approach to deploying HCI research in everyday software, and is also the first step toward a future where anybody can modify any interface. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18797818 >Here are some other interesting things related to scriptable window management and accessibility to check out: aQuery -- Like jQuery for Accessibility https://web.archive.org/web/20180826132551/http://donhopkins... >It would also be great to flesh out the accessibility and speech recognition APIs, and make it possible to write all kinds of intelligent application automation and integration scripts, bots, with nice HTML user interfaces in JavaScript. Take a look at what Dragon Naturally Speaking has done with Python: https://github.com/t4ngo/dragonfly >Morgan Dixon's work with Prefab is brilliant. >I would like to discuss how we could integrate Prefab with a Javascriptable, extensible API like aQuery, so you could write "selectors" that used prefab's pattern recognition techniques, bind those to JavaScript event handlers, and write high level widgets on top of that in JavaScript, and implement the graphical overlays and gui enhancements in HTML/Canvas/etc like I've done with Slate and the WebView overlay.
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