Alternative (Hidden) Commands

When a menu contains more than 12 entries, it becomes difficult to find the command you are looking for. Other applications create icons equivalents for the most used commands. While these shortcuts are useful per se, they don't solve the problem, because the user has less occasions to familiarize herself with the menus.
iNMR hasn't followed the trend of iconizing everything. The menus remain accessible for the casual user. While the number of commands continuously grow, the number of menu entries does not. Several strategies have been implemented: some actions are so automatic that there is no interface; some rarely used commands only have an associated hot key or can be invoked exclusively from the command line. Many options have been relegated into the dialogs and many dialogs have been condensed with the use of panels (a single command can thus open many panels). A few options can only be accessed through contextual menus. Another trick is to hide some powerful commands. They are revealed when the user presses the “alt” key. The alternative command is a modification of a more normal version. It either skips a dialog or transforms a single operation into a parallel treatment that is applied to an ensemble (of windows, files, spectra, etc...). This consistency helps to memorize the associations.
The table reports the 8 existing cases. All the commands below also have a keyboard equivalent. The alternative command can be triggered by the same shortcut, with the “alt” key added. For example: Cmd+S = Save and Cmd+Alt+S = Save All.