Back in late 2021, after a revamp of the DeepSource dashboard, we received a lot of support requests and feedback ⎯ a big part of which pertained to questions regarding why was the global search option of the previous dashboard, discontinued.
Part of the reason was that the old global search was woefully bad and slow. Most of the time, engineers used global search to find a repository (and while you can search through repositories in the Repositories page under team home, it was not the best of experiences when compared to an omnipresent global search bar.
We built the command palette to address the issue of global search and also to speed up existing workflows. Initially, the command palette was launched just as a conduit to search for repositories and basic navigation. Here’s a look into what we shipped for the initial MVP (under a beta flag) -
After enabling the command palette for our biggest enterprise customers, we received an overwhelming amount of feedback from prospective customers as well as free and pro level users on how much they’d want this feature for their daily workflows.
Designing a command palette visually is devilishly simple ⎯ the improvements actually lie in how its logic is structured. While building the palette, we defined 2 states - the commands shown by default when you open it in the team home and it’s child pages, and separate commands when you open it inside a repository.
issues, metrics, reports, history etc.However, you can easily type out the command to navigate to different places in the dashboard, and the results would enable you to go to the concerned page directly without having to click a bunch of times.
An idea to embed actionable widgets in the command palette was also specced out, but was parked for a later update. This feature would have allowed you to do things like re-run analysis for a particular PR, triggering Autofix for an issue, update the configuration file or tweak access control settings, all without leaving the palette. Here is an early prototype 👇
Mid 2023, we gave the command palette a visual facelift, and also added a dedicated button on the dashboard to open the palette instead of just relying on a keyboard shortcut.