I have made an extension prototyping a “command palette” approach to keyboard acceleration in OpenRefine(inspired by what one often sees in IDEs). Bugs are guaranteed but I would find it useful to see some thoughts on the approach as further development(support more column actions) would require some refactoring in core.
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Awesome! Can this be used to call custom Expression snippets?
Other extensions can register commands:
Maybe the extension could be made so that it can auto discover things from the Menu-system but that would need quite a bit of upstream work as it’s very state-dependent at the moment. Very few of OpenRefines own column actions are supported right now as they are also very tightly coupled with the menus.
forget the menus…
I mean could someone use this to add a Custom Expression to fire off.
Imagine a GREL snippet like:
cells.${MyColumn}.replace("abc","xyz")
and I could store that command in the palette as a custom command called “My Replace”.
The command palette syntax would be:
- CTRL+Space to open palette
- begin typing “My Replace” and select it from list with up/down and ENTER.
- then begin typing the column name, select it from list with up/down and ENTER.
- rejoice
Ah I see, the answer is “soon”. 
Extremely exciting! It brings up a lot of interesting topics:
- how to rethink OpenRefine’s user experience in bold ways, and escape from those clumsy and overloaded menus
- how to restructure the code of our front-end to make this easier - perhaps this suggests refactorings that would be meaningful on their own and bring other benefits? I can definitely relate to the issue of coupling with menus at least.
- or is it even worth it and writing an independent front-end is the way to go?!
- to what extent this should be officially supported by an extension point, and how to decide what extension points to maintain
Maybe even others? Anyway - a lot of food for thought already!