OK, I feel like I’m missing something. Commando is marketed as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Much like with Siri, Commando almost never gets me to anything I wanted.
What’s your experience? How do you use Commando? How does it help your work? What’s great about it for you?
Looking forward to how others use it, as well. Personally I went back to using Komodo Edit 6 for the lightning fast Open File in Project and Find Text in Project functionality that sold me on Komodo in the first place.
I use it for just about everything. I can just type a path (or part one one) and there’s my file. I have a bunch of utility scripts/macros) that I can bring up, execute, check the return, and boom. Symbol browsing, boom.
I’m not so up on things like package management via Commando, I think that’s a misstep, but one that I don’ think really affects much.
I find the best use of Commando is with targeted “scopes”. If I open Commando via Ctrl+Shift+O (the “everything” scope) and just start typing, I often don’t get what I’m expecting or get a lot of matching junk that needs to be filtered out. Instead I open Commando in a particular “scope” based on what I need. Edit > Preferences > Key Bindings > Search for “Commando” will give you a list of “Toggle Commando with X scope”. If I’m looking for a file, I’ll use Ctrl+> (“File” scope). If I need to run a command that doesn’t have a key binding, I use the “Tools and Commands” scope.
I use it constantly for the following:
Remember that all of those are fuzzy matching so you don’t have to write complete paths or complete filenames. You can even type parts of a single symbol name if you don’t remember the whole thing.
Those are just the aspects that I use many times a day. I use every aspect of Commando regularly.
Really glad you asked @cdcmicro. Commando is as powerful as we claim it is (I think so any way 
). If it’s not intuitive then we want to here about it. These are the kinds of discussions we like.
@CoreyB, Commando File scope was modeled after Open Files then extended to be more robust. If it’s not working how you used Open Files something might be wrong. I believe it took a bit of getting used to when we first switched from Open Files to Commando (Komodo 8 to 9) but I don’t miss it.
This is going to sound pretty stupid, I realize, but I’m going to ask… how exactly does one enter “Meta+>” and “Meta+<” on a Mac?
Those appear to be the default keybindings for opening Commando with the Files and Open Files scopes based on what I see in the keybindings preferences and under the Help > List Key Bindings menu entry, but where “<” is the shifted “,” character and “>” is a shifted “.”, I can’t seem to get there… Meta+. and Meta+Shift+. (which is how I might expect to get to Meta+>) both seem to be tied to debugging commands. Meta+, goes to Preferences and Meta+Shift+, (which, again, is how I might expect to get to Meta+<) doesn’t do anything.
It’s little ankle-twisters like these that can be just off-putting enough to keep users from poking at some of the goodness that is apparently buried in there…
You’re right, those are not going to work. I think these commands might fall under the category of “superfluous” (finally i get to use that word!). I may just remover those bindings. This would mean you would need to configure them yourself. I’ll look at all the Commando bindings first and see if I can find a logical position on the keyboard for all of them.
When searching for something I’ve never found it faster to open a specific scope I always start from the Everything scope and search for file, symbol, command, tool, etc. from there.
Ctrl+Shift+O is my ‘natural’ use case for Commando. I expect Commando to work like an improved Fast Open. I’m almost always looking for a file in one of my recent Places. And the one I want is only found if it appears in the current Place.
Can you describe the scope of “Files scope”? Is it the current Place? Current project?, Something else?
-Clark
That is the key binding for Commando. Are you saying it’s not working for you? [quote=“cdcmicro, post:8, topic:2955”]
And the one I want is only found if it appears in the current Place.
[/quote]
Yes, it works off your project files. It should say that beside the File scope in the Commando interface when you open it. Commando doesn’t support Recent Files as far as I know. You could file an enhancement request for that. You could also “add” folders to your project then those files will be included in Commando search:
Right click project
Add > Existing Folder
Carey
OK, that’s a start. My SCM (Fossil) isn’t supported in Komodo, and I’m often working with files in multiple logical projects. So Komodo Projects haven’t really been useful for me.
What I’m hearing though is I may be able to get Commando to do what I want by creating container project where most or all of the places I look for files from Komodo are included. Is that true?
-Clark
It’s already set by default:
I’m not sure what you’re doing exactly so I can’t say what might be wrong. I have no problem attempting to set that binding on another command. If you continue to have issues with that please open a new thread. This is diverge from original topic.
You should definitely be using Komodo projects. They are a logic base for many commands and will increasingly be ( i think that sentence made sense…). And yes, that statement is true 
.
Ctrl+Shift+O focuses the Commando tool. No problem there. I was hoping this would be a general Commando discussion. Now it appears to have degenerated into a Support discussion 
That’s good. If we were going to dig deeper into keybinding issues then we would branch into a new thread but so far this discussion has been great I think. Peoples expectations of the tool is obviously really important. We either need to manage or meet those expectation. Preferably the latter but we can’t always do that 
If it is primarily the speed difference then I would suggest you set a keybinding that goes directly to the “Files” scope. By default Commando searches across all scopes which while being pretty fast won’t ever be as fast as searching in “just” the files scope. If you filter down on just the files scope the performance should be the same as it was for Komodo 6, probably a little better.
Note you can configure the responsiveness of Commando searches under Prefs > Commando.