That seems like a decent alternative to menus, motivated by exactly the fault with menus I was describing: "Instead of wasting your time searching the menus and toolbars in an attempt find out that action you need right now [...]"

That feature doesn't make menus better. It makes the IDE better, by giving you a way to avoid the menus, because [sigh] menus suck.

emacs has menus too, you know.

Emacs has command lookup, too.

So does gvim, and they suck too.

I used that all the time. I rarely dig through menus. I hit Ctrl+shift+a and type in part of a command name. It makes discoverability really easy.

Isn't this effectively a more limited reimplementation of a shell?