At this year's Inspire, we had the ever enjoyable "Obscura" sessions. In these sessions, the ACEs dazzle conference attendees with feats of might and miscellania. One particular session has been stuck in my mind ever since; this particular talk (Please tag them if you remember their name) involved the speaker customizing their StreamDeck for use in Alteryx. StreamDecks are essentially keyboards with keys that trigger customizable macros, so the speaker used it to bring keybindings to Alteryx that were novel. Things like a button to drop specific tiles onto the canvas or open certain prompts really blew my mind. It reminded me of the possibilities that Vim offers. Vim is a lightweight text editor that, at its core, prioritizes efficiency above all else. Simply put, once you get used to Vim's system of keybindings and commands, you never really want to use your mouse ever again. For example, one of my favorite commands is dap, which (D)eletes (A)round a (P)aragraph. That's it, 3 quick keystrokes.
What if we had a similar system for Alteryx? Imagine typing "/" to start a search in the canvas. Following that with "Select" to highlight all Select tools. You could then use "n" or "N" to navigate forwards and backwards between results. If you know a specific tool's id number you could type something like "i36formula" to (I)nsert a formula tool after the tool with the id 36. Switching between workflows or navigating a large number of open workflows could be as easy as 2 or 3 keystrokes. You get the gist.
These prospects also got me thinking about Vim's approach to configuration in general. Through a fairly simple system (to be honest this is an assumption; the man pages are too long for me) Vim allows for customization of user settings through commands. I think this could be great inspiration for some sort of system that exposes the color palettes of the program in a sophisticated way that would allow the community to generate custom color schemes. This could also allow popular schemes such as Catpuccin or Gruvbox (or Solarized Osaka if you're cool) to be imported via some sort of XML document. This document could also be used as a general config file for each user.
I think the bones of these kinds of systems are already within the platform, but it would definitely be a big lift for the developers to complete.
