4 spaces and tab not being perfectly aligned sounds like a feature, not a bug to me.
In what scenario would you want them to be aligned? Surely any scenario would be improper use?
100% agree with the rest of course, it's always been a shock to me how little love the essential tooling gets in Windows. You'd think with all the budgets and the fat salaries they'd simply have a competent engineer or two on every (category of) tools. But then you hear about stuff like this or the Terminal debacle and it's like they're not even trying.
I think that in when using a fixed-width font in a text-only editing program, the assumption is that a tab is "made" (visually) of a number of spaces. That number is a frequent ... debatable setting, in software development teams, but at least it's a number of spaces.
Not being able to visually line up indents made out of spaces vs tabs (in any mix) breaks a very basic usability/interaction pattern, and is really rather bad. :(
The number of spaces in tabs is not a debate, that's just personal preference in your editor. The debate is if tabs should be used at all.
That tabs are not a multiple of the character width in a fixed width font is insane of course. But if any character should have that property as a feature, it would be the tab.
You are trying to create your own debate. Nobody raised that here.
The parent is only asking why fixed-width fonts are not rendered with proper alignment (my assumption – on something that was probably already aligned before).
Monospace characters are unaffected by their surrounding characters, right? Unless they're ligatures, in that case their width is a multiple of the single character width.
The only possible way for "\t|" on consecutive lines to be misaligned is either for tab not to have a constant width, or any of the axioms above to be wrong.
I don't get how is this defensible. You don't have to be Steve Jobs to see this and ask "what is this crap?"
> Monospace characters are unaffected by their surrounding characters, right? Unless they're ligatures, in that case their width is a multiple of the single character width.
I am not defending them. If a programmer makes the mistake of having any character in a monospace font be anything other than a multiple of the monospace character width.. sure revoke their programming licence. Straight back to kindergarten, have them make a turtle draw lines on a blank canvas for a couple years.
But that's not a very interesting discussion. If any editor I ever would write would have a fancy feature to mess with the sort of idiot that would use tabs for alignment, maybe I'd make tabs be off by a couple pixels. If it was intentional I would applaud them.
> "the Start menu is Microsoft's flagship user experience. It should represent the very best UI design the company is capable of."
That is a joke, right? I have for years and years had problems to get the start menu search to work properly. It doesn't know about new programs until the following day, it doesn't remember frequently used programs, it can't find basic settings which it used to find fine, and worst of all is that it is _incredibly_ precise with it's recommedation. Typing "tea<RET>" gets you teams, "team<RET>" gets you steam. The next day (or hour, or 15 min) it is the other way around. It doesn't auto clear expired shortcuts, instead opting to ask about it when searching. Windows store apps sometimes don't appear, and if they do, the right click menu doesn't let you see it's path ( sometimes, I believe I had that working once?)
"Flagship user experience". And now the problem is that he can't find chrome in it? Seriously, that is a suprise? Never mind the fact that indexing takes an extremely long time perhaps he has chrome installed and forgot about it- windows has, too.
Contrast this with the apple experience with spotlight, and its night and day. Ateast with powertoys you get a spotlight esque replacement, but that's the irony of it: to get basic shit to work in windows, you have to install third party programs anyway and sometimes even work with regedit.
I press Start and type and the menu drops letters. After it has popped up. Most of the times only the first letters. Sometimes it gets the first one or two and drops the third and fourth.
As Tom Lehrer said: 'Я иду туда, куда сам царь идёт пешком - It stinks.'
> "the Start menu is Microsoft's flagship user experience. It should represent the very best UI design the company is capable of."
Naive take, at best. Why would a desktop OS monopoly like Microsoft look at user experience as a top priority? All they need to do is not make something that's so atrocious, that users leave in droves. And they got that position, so, other priorities have taken over, and I'm sure the start menu serves those purpuses well.
I only updated my gaming machine to Windows 11 about two weeks ago (running Mint on my work device) - and it immediately felt rather incomplete/unfinished to me.
For example, I am using 7zip for compression. In file explorer I right click a file/directory I want to compress, but the option to compress with 7zip is missing from the context menu. So I choose "more options" at the bottom of the menu, and what I get is the Win10 context menu in the old layout (different background, different font+size, etc.) - which has everything the Win11 menu has + some more stuff (including "compress with 7zip").
Nanazip is a "7-Zip derivative intended for the modern Windows experience" available on store/winget with the right hooks in place for Win11 context menus.
Old menu is also available with Shift+Rightclick, or reverted entirely via registry tweak
The trick is to use shift+right click to access the old context menu. Incidentally, shift+right click also enables to copy the full path to any file in file explorer.
The Windows 10/11 "settings" are a hole pile of shit. It seems like Microsoft almost purposefully took the 10 things you would most often use, and nested them so deep that you cant even memorize how to find them anymore. So you get forced into using the god awful search, which returns results FROM THE GOD DAMN INTERNET. If I am in Windows setting, or hell even on just the normal Start Menu, I DON'T WANT any Windows search returning anything from the internet. Ever. If I want to search the internet, I will open a god damn web browser. FFS Microsoft, stop trying to turn yourself into some Frankenstein of iOS/Chromebook.
It's very obvious that pages for the Settings app are being written in some very restricting XML or HTML type markup and they're struggling to give any intuitive structure to settings. Everything is in a very basic single-column layout with virtually no graphics to visually guide your eye and combine or separate items. There doesn't even seem to be a generic table widget with sortable columns available.
I wouldn't call XAML restrictive. It's been used with WPF (their previous UI toolkit) with great effect: it can handle very complex interfaces just fine (look at Visual Studio, it's been using WPF since 2010).
> Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire.
So what's happened to the start menu is cover fire. And the point is to create illusion of progress, progress your competitors feel they have to match(?)
I guess all those database access strategies cost little more than the effort to create them, because they were all thrown away in the end. But cover fire coming from the start menu has come at a cost. It's the Start Menu what finally made me decide Windows wasn't worth revisiting. Like any GUI oriented OS, you have to use the Start Menu repeatedly to get anything done. Which means it has to be fast. Yet sometimes it was taking seconds to respond.
I guess that's what happens to something that gets more and more features added to it to create cover fire. It gets slow, and so bloated that most people wont' use a fraction of what it provides. Yet even though they don't use them, the features still extract their cost.
> The Windows 10/11 "settings" are a hole pile of shit.
Hear, hear. Every time I want to do something with my networks, I have to guess which settings window I need. Win 10 settings window? Network and Sharing Center? Change adapter settings, aka Network Connections? Hyper-V Manager? Wrong! If you want to make your Hyper-V virtual Ethernet switch a private network, you have to bust out PowerShell!
Control Panel has been horrible since Win XP, and even then, you were better off with a third party settings app I'm forgetting the name of. The settings were in a tree structure, and hover text described every feature helpfully.
Poor discoverability. This means you have to know that the setting exists in the first place, and then remember its precise name. Type "static IP" into search, do you see a way to set static IP? I don't get any results at all.
ever tried to test microphone volume levels? every fucking time I have to search three different things before I can find it. I try "microphone", "audio", "volume", and its always the last one I try, and I can never remember for the next time.
Search is not a good UI, because you never get muscle memory with a search.
Speaking of terrible audio UX, windows constantly breaks hardware settings for multi-channel ADCs by disabling all but one channel (seems to be after most updates). Fixing it requires about a dozen clicks through many esoteric nested menus, including having to click hyperlink style text hidden on the far upper right side of a window away from the buttons. There are several audio settings pages in windows, and some of them offer no path to fixing the setting. If it's possible to reach the necessary page by searching in the start menu i have yet to find it. It's been like this for 2 years. It's astounding that working professionals would pay money for this garbage.
> I have to search three different things before I can find it
I've had the same problem; Microsoft has been changing the keyword that triggers the audio input/output control panel, but the official and unchanging (so far) name of the panel is "Change system sounds" and "sys" in start menu search returns that as the 1st or second result.
> Search is not a good UI, because you never get muscle memory with a search.
I feel like I do though... I often get in a pattern of just searching for the same few characters I know will bring up the right thing. Though Windows has a habit of deciding to change around the ordering on you.
The search sometimes just straight up does not work for me. Like 1-2 Minutes after a cold boot (I have fast startup turned off) it's completely unusable.
Tested out the screen recording feature in Windows 11 yesterday. Thought it was nice to have this built into the OS - it can be activated using Win+Alt+R. It worked fine until I minimized the current window - this made it stop without giving any hint. Turns out "Gaming features aren't available for the Windows Desktop or File Explorer" - but it works fine for recording Chrome.
Experiences like this just feels user hostile and plentiful when using Windows.
The newer Start Menus causes stress any time I use them, as I have no idea how much data it will end up leaking, and because it is more likely to yield a random internet search than showing me a locally installed program.
Win+Alt+R recording is sporadically available in Win10 too. It worked well for general desktop recording for the colleagues who tried it, but it produced huge video files.
Honestly Windows 11 is getting better all the time. It's much cleaner and less cluttered compared to 10 as well.
It's not perfect of course, but it's the best one so far imo, and it keeps getting better. I really like the new way to connect and manage Bluetooth devices from the taskbar that was recently added.
But then again, it's Windows, so when you look underneath the shiny new surface and realize e.g there's no way to add seconds to the watch display due to performance issues - the facade starts to slowly peel away.
Getting better all the time? Yes, so do wounds. Microsoft wounded technology for so many with Windows 11. It's gotten to the point it auto installs even without elevation, so many of us are home with family for Thanksgiving only to spend hours with confused parents trying to navigate the mess of broken 'features'.
Forced OS upgrades should be regulated. Microsoft, Google and other operating system vendors should not be using dark patterns to "encourage" upgrades when users aren't paying attention.
I work at Microsoft, it's a great company to work for. But I was bummed when I.T. upgraded my dev machine from Win10 to Win11. I really hope whatever comes next is better.
Well . . . forever ago, devs there managed their own installs. And maybe they had boxes that weren't up to snuff for joining ntdev and maybe they had something so old it was basically a network infection, so MSIT would deal with them.
But anyplace that forces machine config on devs? They don't really want devs. Even Ballmer valued developers (developers . . . developers). And he was a tragically engineering-impaired human being.
I want to use an OS on my own terms, for my own ends. I want an OS that respects the boundaries I set for it. This includes respecting my time, my attention, my privacy and above all my consent. I should be the user, it should be the tool, not the other way around.
Every new version of windows seems to provide less of this than the previous version. More ads, more being forced into things, more telemetry, more updates reverting settings I made, less respect for my express commands, less useful feedback on what the OS is actually doing and why.
It's a large enterprise. Big enough there will be a range of views about any change. I would be amazed if an EX- ui chief in any enterprise would always align to design decisions his successors enact. It's stunningly unlikely because it suggests innovation is stultified by the dead hand of prior staff.
That said, I think its not the best UI either. But the POLA here is "don't be surprised if people who replace you try to put their mark on things they control"
This isn't a good example to use to critique the Start Menu because it's a special case --- downloading Chrome is an action that Microsoft does not want you to complete, so making it a good experience is a Microsoft non-goal.
why does Microsoft get to have any say in that? Most people using Windows purchased it, either directly or hidden inside the computer cost. Microsoft decision making power should begin and end with designing the product.
They have no business making some tools harder or easier to install than others, the same as a hammer has no business favoring some nails over others.
It's not though. It has some great improvements on some fronts (no auto-reboot, built-in terminal, WSL already setup, better multi-monitor and dock-undock behavior) and worse on other fronts like the start menu.
Harris was chief of the Windows User Experience for Windows 8. He created Windows 8. He created Metro UI. He created the Windows 8 Start screen, charms, allowed ads in its inbox apps (e.g. Weather), etc. Keep that in mind when Harris says things like "the Start menu is Microsoft's flagship user experience. It should represent the very best UI design the company is capable of."
Did you read the article and see what he was complaining about? He typed the word "Chrome" and the top hit was a web search with a bunch of ads on the right-hand sidebar. His complaints were 100% justified and imho correct, and the immediate jump to ad-hominem attacks rather than debating the content of the article seems uncalled for.
It's fair to not take any UX advice from the person responsible for the Win8 start menu serious, that was a much bigger UX turd than Win10 or Win11 could ever hope to be.
sorry, but this is one of the few cases where its justified. Anyone whos developed on Windows since 7 or before (raises hand) knows how awful Window UI has been since 8.
You wouldn't want Richard Nixon (if he was alive) commenting on Obama's term would you? Even if Harris is 100% right, its just tone deaf and in bad taste. No one want to hear his opinion on Microsoft products. Hes done enough already.
His personal history contextualises his point, which is distinct from criticising his personal history at broad.
For example, had I said "Barry designed the new start UI. He also has received several speeding tickets" you could make the claim that I am making an ad hominem attack on Barry, since the only reason I would bring up the speeding ticket is to make Barry seem less responsible. His speeding does not affect his ability to design a start menu nor does it influence his design decisions.
However, if I said "Harry has been seen criticising the new start UI for being inconsistent. Harry previously designed the new Settings menu in Windows, which was also inconsistent", there are some important differences to take account of. Specifically, the fact he was involved in the development of another feature in the Windows product, AND it can also be criticised for the same failing that Harry has now applied to the start menu gives us information ABOUT Harry's criticism.
Now we can say "Harry is going to come at this from the perspective of someone on the team" and "Harry has made the same mistake before". Depending on the details of Harry's comment, that could make his comment less trustworthy, but conversely it can also make it more valid.
Calling that an ad hominem is, in my opinion, excessively reductive, and in the case of contextual data being added that is contextually relevant, not appropriate.
I would pay so much money to just be able to use Windows 7's UI with Windows 10's performance improvements.
Try spinning Windows 7 up in a VM sometime. Using it is such a wonderous experience. It's almost perfect. I miss it so much. To me, Windows 8/8.1/10/11 have all been massive downgrades to different extents.
I use open shell and 7+ Taskbar Tweaker (https://ramensoftware.com/7-taskbar-tweaker) + also disable all pinned apps and reenable quick launch - this makes it look like win7/XP pretty closely (though I also disable windows updates so it doesn't get reverted randomly)
Plus in Win 11, we lost the ability to put the taskbar vertically on the left or right side of the screen. When coding on a laptop, I want the max vertical screen space. Taskbar at the bottom means I see 10% less source code.
I thought Windows 8 was pretty good at the time, in hindsight because I had a Surface Pro and that was the computer that it was entirely designed for. Their three-column splitscreen layout was neat, if you could look past only having about 5 of the newfangled-touchscreen-UI-apps worth installing in the entire store. Or if you treated the OS as mostly being a OneNote launcher.
These days I'm inclined to agree with you. Windows 7 was the peak, newer versions have gone far downhill with trying to make me accidentally open Bing everywhere and automatically installing Candy Crush products that no one asked for.
When this computer dies, decent odds I replace it with a Steam Deck. Doubly so if they can stuff Thunderbolt into the next one and sell me a GPU dock with it.
But someone made the Bing metrics go up for a few years, so surely that's worth burning any customer goodwill to the ground.
Why does customer goodwill matter at all? Even if they make everyone absolutely hate using Windows, what are customers going to do, switch to a different OS? Decades of experience has shown that people will whine and complain endlessly about Windows, that this is the last straw, and how they're going to switch to Linux "real soon now", and they never do.
These days? They won’t lose all their business users immediately, but the shitty $300 laptops with 15” 1366x768 displays are being chipped away at by iPads and Chromebooks, and the less shitty laptops could mostly be replaced by a MacBook Air which is a frighteningly capable computer. I do think making their OS worse is accelerating this.
My biggest gripe is they finally removed the option to have windows not combined with labels in the taskbar. I guess it was bound to happen eventually.
That is the biggest feature stopping me from upgrading. I generally have 20-30 windows open, usually 4 or 5 browser windows with tabs grouped by what I'm doing with them. Combined labels would destroy my workflow.
I for one, couldn't go back to a laptop without a touch screen, and for current purposes, Id be unhappy without the pen input to go with the multi touch.
While the UIs look bad, the touch and pen UX together in windows 10 is fantastic
XP was fine. 2000 was good. Nobody pines for Windows ME. People said those things and they meant it. Windows 8-11 feel pretty bad, overall. 7 was okay.
XP was fine because you could throw it into 2000 mode, though looking back the fisher-price UI was just the UI.
Windows Vista wasn't terrible if you had a beefy machine and well-supported hardware. 7 was basically Vista but with newer machines and better hardware support. 8+ has been meh.
Adding a search to the start menu is huge and completely changed how I use it -- I almost never do anything besides hit the Windows key and start typing a search query. Besides that, the way nested menus worked was frustrating and I'd frequently waste time doing things I didn't intend trying to navigate them.
That explains it. I use win+R (the hotkey for run) the same way since I think win95.
When I search the start menu, it does the weirdest things, e.g searching notepad via bing instead of starting it, or preferring the uninstaller above the real program. So I learned that the start menu is basically broken for search, and became harder to use as a menu. I mostly abandoned it.
Meanwhile, the gui widgets, built in windows and control panels became much worse and dumbed down. It pretends to be a helpfull assistant, but behaves more like an arrogant drunk. I want to do some work on the machine, not be told about some experience it really wants to shove in my face.
Well, the difference is Windows + R I would need an exact command and the search bar I don't. I share some of your frustrations about the relevance of the top result but still, partial matches are important to me.
What they have today is an UI disaster: cannot tell which window is active, scrollbars are so 90s - nobody cares about them, settings would make Google proud - one cannot know if the text is only a description or it starts a config dialog, 1 px window border - good luck resizing on a 4k monitor, gray on gray, titlebar highjacking, hard drive hidden in explorer beside virtual folders etc.
Windows 7 was the last MS operating system I've used on a personal computer of mine. Once I did some work for a local ad tech company, they dictated I should use a windows computer for work. I discovered the hell of WSL and lasted about 12 weeks on that gig. The fact that I had to train tech leads on Git and was having arguments about "pushing directly to production is bad, we should have a staging environment at the very least" did not help.
I don't notice much difference between experience in Windows 7 and Windows 11, aside from needing to manage more policies to prevent their cloud based services. Windows 11 isn't bad if you disable the adware portion. The terminal app is pretty good now and WSL works, albeit not as pleasant as something more native like Linux or even macOS terminal, but the adware is what cripples it IMO.
Windows 11 adds other features that are useful though. I agree, Windows 10 is sufficient but if you know what policies to use then Windows 11 feels pretty much like Windows 10 with some new features.
batch files are handled by cmd.exe, not by conhost.exe. Cmd.exe in turn opens default console. Similarly for powershell, python, farmanager and other console-based apps.
I'm still not sure I understand what made that so heretical other than being different. I can't really imagine any scenario where I'd be using the start menu and want to see something else at the same time.
The reason why you need to open the start menu is often on screen, then you hit the Windows key and the context that should be driving your next action is hidden. All it takes is a brief moment of distraction and — if you're like me — you'll completely forget why you opened the menu in the first place.
It's like walking into a room and forgetting why you had entered. At that point, maybe you return where you came from and see an unopened package. Then you remember: you were retrieving scissors.
When the motivating context is in front of you, it's easier to remember what your goal is.
What I thought was nice about it was that, if you're primarily a search user, you got a lot more real estate for the search results. I suppose they achieved some of that in the new design and the feedback has been pretty close to unanimous, though.
Everyone on Twitter is a critic, thinking their opinion is the right one, and looking for their 5 minutes of fame by shitting on some low hanging fruit for clicks and likes hoping that will lift them out of their anonymity.
I can't imagine a great designer like Jonny Ive (not that everything he did was perfect), sinking so low as to shit on Windows's start menu as he probably has bigger fish to fry.
Great people don't need attention from shitting on other people's work because they get enough recognition from the quality of their own work. Only the has-beens with over inflated egos do that.
Honestly, I think Jonny Ive makes good industrial design (minus the far too extreme "minimalism" push with the butterfly keyboard MacBooks; they really need an "editor" like Steve Jobs) but their UI/UX design has really not been good. Alan Dye is way worse.
I find modern Apple software UI/UX design to be really devoid of functionality, information density, etc. I'm not the only one with this opinion (just listen to any Accidental Tech Podcast episode where they talk about it).
The Windows 8 start menu is fundamental, and it alienated a lot of people, something Apple have never done, they've kept their basic design consistent.
It is not, especially not for power users, and those who want to become power users - discoverability of keyboard shortcuts is absolutely shit now.
And unlike even the Reddit devs, they made it worse and made it impossible to keep the old menu bar setup.
The ribbon is part of the lamentable drift in Windows UI towards intentional dumbing down and not even allowing the power users to do what they could before -- see also the new Windows Settings menu...
That he’s quoting fitts law to me shows how frozen in time he is. The start menu is something you seldom use; the milliseconds saved in mouse time is effectively irrelevant over time, and completely irrelevant in a touch based system. What’s more important is that people understand what’s happening, the system is simple and self explanatory, and feel happy using it (meaning the UI/UX is attractive and consistent). I’m not saying Windows 11 is any of those things, but Fitts Law is the furthest from their worries. Yet it’s the kind of thing that came out of HCI conferences for years with little lasting translation into the modern era.
It now takes 2 seconds to start on an 8-core computer with a PCIe 4 NVMe SSD.
Oh, and a tab indent and four spaces are almost… but not identically aligned.
They’re like… one or two pixels off. With a fixed width font!
This is just sad: https://paste.pics/aacb91eda1bfb46f968bed2004ad2328
Notepad can also no longer open large text files in under a minute, whereas the Electron-based VS Code does it nearly instantly!
Where is Raymond Chen when you need him? https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98...