embark

mbination of words in any order or casing. Another example: grep in the current project for any function matching foo bar baz in any order followed by an open paren, restrict the search to only header files, export to a buffer, run search in replace in that temporary buffer, review the changes, then commit the modification to disk in every matched file with a single keystroke. https://github.com/minad/consult/ https://github.com/oantolin/orderless/ https://github.com/oantolin/embark/

search/arrows to go to an interesting piece of text (e.g something underlined), run embark, and it lists all the potential things you can do with it (e.g open in external browser, or download an archived copy). It's just that keyboard UIs do not tend to be geared around it. That though is the sort of thing the mouse is good at: you see something interesting, you prod it to see what you can do with it. Say you saw a phrase you didn't understand in the browser. Currently, with a mouse you'd highlight it, right click, and then select the search with search engine option. With keyboard you'd open the search engine, and enter the phrase. Both get you to the same place. Now if we extend the mouse to have a "I would like to know idioms better" option. You could just select the phrase, right click, and a definition could be there waiting for you next to the context menu. It could even be there on hover. With the keyboard though, you'd generally run an "I would like to know idioms better" command. This would then ask you which idiom on the page would you like to understand. You then select it, and presto. A faster version could potentially have idiom meanings show up the moment you ran the command by a similar hover effect (or just listing all discovered idioms in a popup etc). One of the differences here though is that from the mouse you still have a list of actions on the text open, so maybe if you liked the definition you could then copy the phrase. This certainly could be done from the keyboard UI: just have it list other applicable commands that could be run on the selection generated from the command that searched for phrases. No reason why it could not then spawn something asking if you wanted to "(c)opy, c(u)t" etc like the context menu. But that is only visible because there was a phrase you didn't know. If you didn't know that there was a command to define phrases, you wouldn't have found out. In theory you could have commands register everything they could act on, and then have another command let the user select an interactive thing, and list the commands that registered for it. I think that would be overwhelming though, as something like a dictionary command would register for every word. Ultimately the mouse is just different then the keyboard, and I think that there is interesting potential in having a tool that can interrogate arbitrary things on your screen. [1]: https://github.com/oantolin/embark