> User research shows that for many users, the way they create a new file is to find an existing file of the same type, copy it, then open the copy and delete everything in it.
> For people with a document-centric view of the world, programs aren’t really things that you think about. What you really work on are documents.
Okay, but I don't think people create new paper documents by photocopying an existing document and covering everything with correction fluid. The user interface of those physical document-authoring tools (typewriters, paper and pen, etc.) seem to make it quite clear how to start a new blank document.
The fact that people can't discover any other way of creating a new document on their computer is obviously a legitimate problem, but I can't see how the New menu is a particularly good solution because it doesn't seem any more discoverable than the list of document-authoring programs in the Start menu.
I'm of course in agreement that user research is vital and that not everyone is aware of what you might consider the "obvious" or "best" way to create a document on a computer. I would like to see more details about how and why the New menu came to be (apparently) the primary solution to this UI problem.
Wow, I would never have thought of doing that to get to a new state. I can't think of the number of times that I have opened an existing document to make alt versions of, but forget to Save As before making those changes so my alt is the version. Hopefully undo buffer allows me to go back to start, Save As, redo back to where I was. Too many times.
I love/hate when I hear about the covoluted ways that users use a computer in the most illogical way that apparently makes perfect logical sense to them. It's like the Stupid Criminals bit on the Tonight Show. All you can think at first hearing is surely nobody is that dumb, but yet, here we are looking at someone being that dumb. One co-worker was often heard saying "I can't fix stupid"
Real world comparisons don’t help you here - creating a new digital document from an existing document is a very simple four step process. Duplicate, open, select all, delete. If it were that easy in the real world, perhaps we would.
Especially for things like letterhead or forms. Who wants to go to a room filled with thousands of different forms, if they could just get a fresh and clean one with four simple gestures?
It seemed to me that the author was claiming that people copy existing documents on computers only because it's the only (or easiest) way they know of to create a new document of a given type, not because it is actually the easiest way to create a new document of a given type. It seemed to me that the author was decrying the fact that so many people copy existing documents and delete all the contents, and was providing that as justification for why the New menu exists.
> I can't see how the New menu is a particularly good solution because it doesn't seem any more discoverable than the list of document-authoring programs in the Start menu.
I think you’ve missed the key point of this article, which is that a lot of people use computers without a clear idea what programs are. They know they can double-click a spreadsheet file and have a window open that lets them do things with that spreadsheet; but to them, I guess, that’s just “what a spreadsheet file is like” and there is no notion of this thing called Excel which is mediating their experience of the file. To a person like this, “discovering the program in the Start menu” is not something that can happen within the bounds of how their ontology of computers works.
It’s a credit to the designers of Windows that they design to accommodate users like this, though it also goes a long way to explaining why Windows is so annoying to many professional computer users.
I understand that completely, and my response again is that discovering the New menu doesn't seem easier to me than discovering the list of programs in the Start menu. I don't think the person's knowledge about what a "program" is is particularly relevant, especially since most of the items in the New menu are of the form "{program name} Document". I think it's pretty clear that in most cases the person must (and likely will) be aware of the names of programs they want to use (like Microsoft Word) even if they don't have explicit knowledge of what a "program" is. (Granted, a couple of the options do not contain the name of the program used to author them, like "Bitmap image" and "Rich text document," but those are the exceptions.)
Most likely, a user of the New dialog was shown “right-click here and select this and now ‘Word Document’ and then…” and thenceforth has followed these instructions essentially as a mystic ritual which achieves a necessary result, without a real understanding of what the steps mean. They don’t know that they’re running a program, they just know they’re making a document appear on the screen. Though they could probably guess the phrase “Microsoft Word” is pertinent to the ritual, they don’t know what it refers to, so transferring that insight would be a matter of guesswork.
You could just as easily show them the steps on the Start menu, it’s true- but then you have the separate question of saving the file somewhere and being able to find it again later. I know from helping elderly relatives with their computer problems that “directories” are another confusing concept for a lot of people. Pointing to the Desktop and saying “save it here” makes intuitive sense and makes the file easy to find later, but to e.g. “Save As” to the Desktop from inside Word requires an understanding of the occult dual nature of the Desktop-as-a-directory and the Desktop-on-the-screen, which is an insight reserved for enlightened wizards. Using the New menu lets the user restrict all their interactions with the file system to, at worst, Windows Explorer, which is a huge simplification!
(Example of where this is coming from; once when my father, a practicing medical doctor in his 70s, needed to e-sign a PDF on an unfamiliar computer I spent about half an hour trying to explain the concept of “close the document in this app and open it in this other (e-signing enabled) app.” I could about as well have been speaking Greek, or telling a Flatlander about flying.)
This is actually an interesting assessment for me, since smartphones are pretty much the exact opposite (can't even see the filesystem on some of them): There's only apps, and the apps have stuff in them. Sure there's ways of exchanging data between apps, but documents/files aren't really a thing.
Conceptually, that means I feel like I'm using services/tools to interact with this abstract 'data.' By keeping 'data' abstract, it feels less solid who owns it, who's responsible for it, and where it is. Now I'm interested in the opposite system where the 'documents' are the core concept of the device, and programs are just "things your computer/smartphone can do with this document." Really make the data feel like it's /there/ you know?
Maybe it takes into account if the user doesn't have write access to the folder? If the user didn't have access, the touch command would fail, whereas going directly to vim, it would only fail when trying to save (potentially losing the work done in the file)?
I don't use vim, but can't you just skip the first command? I would guess that the second command would work just fine. Presumably the only difference would be that the file wouldn't be created until you first save the file within vim.
> Presumably the only difference would be that the file wouldn't be created until you first save the file within vim.
And for me anyway, this is a benefit. When I used windows (and the same holds for google docs) I always had "New Folder"s everywhere that I'd created for whatever reason and then changed my mind or got distracted. Same with new documents. In vim, I do like to say, and it I change my mind and don't save it, I never see it again. If I touch'd it first, inevitably I'd have empty files everywhere.
I've done a similar thing, but not with touch. I open the file in vim and then save it immediately. Keeps me from being sad if permissions are going to stop me after I've put some work creating the file content.
Depends a bit on your shell. That works great in bash. Other shells have different semantics. For example, zsh will wait for input until you type ^D or ^C and tcsh will complain about an invalid null command.
The variant I know that works identically in pretty much every shell I've ever tried is:
:>myfile.txt
And if you don't want to overwrite the file if it exists:
What I find interesting about `vim /path/to/file` is that it is neither document-centric nor application-centric. Or in a way it is both: You need to know which application you want to use, but you select the location of the document before launching the application.
I wonder why this feels so natural in the terminal but so annoying in GUIs. I cannot remember any specific examples, but I think there are some GUI applications that require you to select a location before you start editing a new document (maybe some audio workstations?). I remember feeling annoyed by that.
Then again, the difference between "document-centric" and "application-centric" doesn't make a lot of sense in the context of the command line because 90% of files you work with are text files anyway. There is much less coupling between document types and applications than in the GUI world.
"Create a thing here" is a really powerful interaction. You often start the process of creation by navigating near the relevant bit (path in the file system, module in the codebase, etc), and then realize that you need a new file/class/method/whatever in the specific place you're looking. A consistently-available "New" menu seems like a good primitive in the computing experience.
Key insight. One annoying thing in many workflows is different programs and file environments (GUI or CLI) bein gout of sync with the patterns of the work I'm doing; why (I ask myself) am I having to traverse the same routes around my directory tree like a squirrel carrying nuts and and berries back and forth?
There's no flow between the OS and application UI in most instances.
You're welcome, I'm sure. I'm lucky enough to have a decent size yard and I spend a lot of time trying to see things from the perspective of the animal and plant life that inhabits it. A lot of our information problems (imho) come from too much detail of specificity at the wrong scale. You don't look at a tree as a collection of leaves, or draw one by cataloguing all their sizes. Likewise a tree rarely grows as a pure function of its DNA-encoded phyllotaxis patterns, but rather a combination of those and the variations of its environment - soil composition,w ater, other roots, helper fungi, sunlight, prevailing winds, and local animal life. It's truly amazing to watch the interactions between different plants and trees over a period of years.
I think because we're so used being able to catalog, measure, categorize and sort our various files and directory structures, manipulate them programmatically, have our browsers or operating systems identify a particular leaf by reference or just by searching for some of the micro-structure within it (usually words) etc. etc. we tend to overlook the organicess of how a data collection grows and opt instead of producing analytics measuring it. It'd be like trying to describe a tree with tables of vector statistics about the angle and length of branch sections - it's valid in certain ways, but doesn't give you a good sense of the tree's shape or structure. It's as if we've developed a sort of techno-myopia towards the shape of our own output and activities, and approach everything by dissecting it into slices and then ranking them by various criteria.
That goal has been stated and sought repeatedly, usually with poor results.
Microsoft Bob is probably the most infamous example. An early-dot-com-era roommate worked at Xerox PARC which had its own spatial 3D file manager / management interface. There were three principle problems:
- It severely taxed the limits of available consumer hardware at the time.
- It was confusing as hell.
- It didn't solve any real-world problem(s), and made numerous others worse.
Though in fairness it did somewhat resember Doom / Castle Wolfenstein....
File or document management shouldn't be the most intensive process your computer does, it should be one of the least intensive, saving processing power for Real Work, and not being resource-starved when you actually need to use it.
The organisation(s) that seem most useful are lists, lists of lists (hierarchies), tag-based systems, or search-based systems. (The fact that file-based search remains primitive in most system is its own small wonder of modern computing, though yes, the situation is slightly improved over, say, 30 years ago.)
Oh yes, I remember being impressed by its awfulness. by comparison Clippy was...not terrible.
I think part of what made 3d and other very visual file managers so bad (or at best, very slow like Treemappers) is the effort to render everything accurately at once, which is bound to be slow across terabyte scales.
Maybe we would be better off exploring Voronoi/blob/fisheye network diagrams for representing context, with the size indicating the number of files nested within. The Carrot2 search engine implements a variation of this idea which is sometimes very useful for topic exploration.
Render lag and lossyness is part of it, but there's more.
I've had a fair bit of experience with large book archives (university libraries), and have a pretty good sense of what "a million books" looks like (a large on-campus multi-storey building might house 1--5 million books). There's a physical progression, from the words on a page (~250 typewritten, about 500 typeset), to pages in a chapter, chapters in a book, books on a shelf, bookcase, aisle, library floor, building, campus, etc.
A well-organised library gives structure to navigating that space, logically, metaphorically, and literally. And there's a lot of hard work that goes into that organisation.
Simply tossing a 3-D overlay onto a file manager ... isn't that. And most of the projects I've encountered either don't realise that, or don't give that fact its due.
For that matter, the concepts of search and locality (as in, works near each other) have entirely different manifestations online and in a physical archive. Shelf-reading is still one of my favourite pastimes.
I've gone to a very document-heavy workflow over the last few years. I still program but a lot of what I do is about collecting and curating documents and data on people and organizations and then synthesizing that information in various ways, sorta like business intelligence. So I have maybe 20-30k documents/media and maybe ~100 top- and second-level folders that I access regularly.
Luckily I have the kind of memory to put things somewhere and then know where to look a year or more later, but in the last year or two I've noticed that I'm using the quick access (ie your 20 or 30 most recent files) in a very similar matter to a stack in assembler. Also a lot of my busiest folders are sorted by date rather than filename because I depend heavily on the contextual memory when I learned things.
What you really want a lot of the time is New for Project (...based on template, or based on copy) with support for projects built into the OS and applications.
So - for example - instead of folders you'd see the same list of popular/recent/alphabetised projects in every app.
And you could link project collections into super-projects with links and/or copies of specific data and working environments.
The nested filing cabinet + aliases metaphor is old and never really worked all that well anyway, but we're stuck with it because it was easy to implement back when all of this was first designed and computers were a thousand times slower.
Sort of… it is the idea of having a bunch of files that are multiple types located in an organized space. E.g. in your home office you may have papers, but also notebooks, envelopes, cds, etc; whatever you find is useful for storing information. You have them organized on your desk in a way that works well for you. If you need a tool to read one (like a cd will need a cd player) you bring the item to the tool in order to use it.
Modern computers are trying to move away from the concept of a “desktop” or filesystem, and instead you open up the file you want from within the program that you use to open it. It would be like you have all your cds in a big jukebox that you can select from, or all your documents in a big binder, or something like that. They become isolated within the devices you use to read them.
It may be better for some people, but that is not how I like to organize things. Particularly when I want to move something from one device to another.
Sure, it's just a pity there's no kind of shared context, such that if the last 8 or 10 operations were in a particular folder, a new operation with a similar document type might default to looking there.
On Windows, there is a shortcut to recent folders on the left panel. Also, in most open/save dialogs the file name field has a history pop-up list with full paths. You pick one, delete just file name, hit Enter and jump to it's folder.
> There's no flow between the OS and application UI in most instances.
Directory Opus (a file manager for Windows) somehow extends most Windows file pickers so Ctrl+G moves the file picker to whatever folder Directory Opus has open. I still feel a twinge of satisfaction every time this lets me skip re-traversing my file tree. I don't think it does anything for a Qt file picker though.
It also promotes being able to hit Ctrl+S to save state as soon as any work is entered. Also PLEASE standardize on ONE for each keyboard language!; For English that's Ctrl+S.
Not sure if this is what you’re saying, but macOS no longer needs you to choose to save in order to retain your work. Rebooting after having 50 unsaved documents open means you get the same 50 windows. Most likely with the very last letter you typed still there (other than that: maybe a word or two needs to be retyped)
I'll often use touch just that way, in part because I can also apply standard features / functions in the process, particularly a datestamp:
touch <mnemonic-$(datestamp)>
Where datestamp is a bash function:
datestamp () { date +%Y%m%d; }
In several scripts / tools, the title (and other metadata) are automatically generated and added, with sanity checks for characters, casing (lowercase preferred), and tokenisation (usually '-' between words, '_' between elements, and '--' between repeated elements, e.g., multiple authors. The results can be longish, but descriptive, filenames. With a low collision probability.
It’s like plonking a shovel in the ground and saying this is the spot.
Metaphors for everyday actions don’t need to be about forcing the real world into the computer world. A lot of the ways of thinking feel like they are one and the same.
Another example, for me, off the top of my head: rummaging with find and grep but then scanning the output with less feels identical to hunting for red 4x1 Lego blocks or M8 nylon locking nuts.
why? It's basically a poor man's fuzzy search. You do remember some part of the name you are looking for so you filter your data set with what you know for sure and then visually scan the rest.
IMO browsing to the location first, and then creating the thing in that spot, is fuzzy search. The equivalent to "plonking a shovel" would be knowing exactly where a file should go in the hierarchy and touching/creating it with a single invocation from the top-level.
The status of a non-saved document in all software is always a bit strange too. In Confluence it’s a draft-before-creation, as opposed to a draft of an existing page.
To me, working in a new unsaved document feels uncomfortable. The idea that your Word window would already have an underlying file in the correct folder is reassuring. You can smash Ctrl+S all you need.
There is much redundancy in windows. But it's redundancy that things about edge cases like these. One could even edit it if one wanted to. It'd be nice if Microsoft had a nice and easy front end for it. https://thegeekpage.com/how-to-edit-right-click-new-menu-in-...
Definitely, and not just for creating things. Continuing here allows you to keep your train of thought without a distraction. The button I use most in my file manager is 'Open in Terminal' and I love it because I don't have to re-navigate through the tree.
I do `new > text document` enough so in 20 years that I still do it for all types of reasons. Often I do it when I signing up for an unknown-if-useful service and copy paste stuff into this newly created file.
I am sure in my early days, I used `new > Bitmap image` and it wasn't valid so I never used it again. Infact `new > folder` and `new > text document` is all I use, and I just noticed I have many options here.
This brought back memories, maybe Win98, where you would right click then accidentally mouse over the "New" menu and have the computer swap for 15-20 seconds in order to bring up the large list of new things you could possibly create.
Even if it shouldn’t, does it really matter? If you can’t change it, regardless the reasons, and getting an SSD is a fairly cheap/simple solution, then why wouldn’t you just get an SSD? Nobrainer.
Explorer context menu is extensible (via COM), and lots of apps register themselves there for various minor features. The more you have registered, the slower it loads, because it has to instantiate all the components backing those menu items - and they're often registered as out-of-proc servers that require spawning.
Save As is particularly worthless in Windows since Windows goes out of its way to obfuscate the file system. It's far simpler to create a new file in a folder and start from there.
OSX does the same thing, too. I always have to go and turn the setting on just to see my home folder, not even to mention actually seeing file paths anywhere, or God forbid finding root in Finder.
macOS goes further, by not only hiding the path of folders but showing a lot of views that aren't folders. Clicking on "pictures" might very well show only picture files but from anywhere in your home folder and under. Also there are (were?) tags.
macOS Finder defaults are pretty weird if you think about it. We've gotten used to its quirks but… why is the world isn't the desktop aligned to the grid by default? And why doesn't the grid automatically stretch to fit the screen like Windows does?
Another one is that there's no toolbar button to delete files since they expect you to drag them to the trash. Please I'm not dragging files for 1000px with a trackpad as an entry-level user.
“lets you create the file directly where you want it, saving you the trouble of having to navigate through the Save As dialog just to get back to where you started.”
Yes - all the prior arguments seem to fall flat when this simple reason exists. I am frequently already in or near the directory where I want to create the file when I decide to create it. Or at the very least, navigating the filesystem is just easier in whatever tool I'm using than in the save dialogue.
> And who among us can say they never created a new class or project by copying an existing one, and then deleting everything inside?
Why would I do that? Sure, I've copied classes and whole repositories around, then deleted most of the meat but the reason for copying instead of starting fresh is because a lot of the boilerplate and directory structure can be reused.
I don't use Visual Studio but on VS Code it's pretty much the same as everywhere else:
Either:
* Cmd/Ctrl + N to open a new buffer, then Cmd/Ctrl + S to save it using th OS file picker; or
* Right-click on the file browser pane on the directory to create the file, select New File and give it a name.
I 100% forgot how I did it, but somewhere in the Visual Studio installation folders is one containing the empty project files for each type of project. I've replaced my blank 'Command Line' project template with one that already contains a lot of my favourite boilerplate code.
What a weird hill to die on. I gave up trying to navigate the Start Menu to launch programs around Win7 in disgust of Windows' continued "helpful" reorganisation of it.
My main way to create new files is DEFINITELY "rightclick -> New -> *", because I usually have the directory I'm working in already open in Explorer, because that's where I'm doing my work, so I'm already there! ... The alternative to finding Paint in the start menu and then later on finding my folder in whatever convoluted network drive I'm working on to save the file, is just hitting [Enter] to open the file you just made.
Maybe my reading comprehension failed me, but my takeaway was that the article was very much not in support of it. "Why does the New menu even exist for creating new empty files? What’s the point of having a New menu anyway?" Supports my view, I feel.
The rest of the article is a schizophrenic compilation of often single-sentence paragraphs barely relating to each other. Regardless, having your articles' title and opening sentence to mean the opposite of what you intend is pretty bad writing, if that's what you're proposing he's doing.
(edit: Sorry OP, apparently you've touched a nerve here)
That makes the whole article make a lot more sense, thanks. I guess I was reading the body as if it was elaborating on (what I read as) a complaint in the headline, not a question leading to an answer.
Agree on all points, but I just wanted to mention that the "finding my folder" step got a lot easier for me when I noticed I could copy and paste paths. With my folder open in the explorer window, I just click in the path display box, ctrl-c, and then paste it into the save menu's path box.
Much faster than clicking through a web of deeply nested folders.
Although, of course, this doesn't work when some app has rolled their own save/open menu that doesn't allow for navigating directly to a pasted folder path.
The introduction of win+"stub" in Win8 was pretty great, but with Win10 this has been polluted by "search the web for my program" appearing just a fraction of a second before the program itself. Sometimes it even brings up the installer .exe that's still sitting in my downloads folder before it brings up the program itself.
There's a registry setting you can change that completely disables web results. Aside from hiding results your didn't want in the first place, it speeds up start menu search a bit. I'd need to Google it so I'll leave that for you to do yourself if you're interested.
Obviously that's not very helpful to the vast majority of users, who are mostly not techy enough to touch their registry.
> I gave up trying to navigate the Start Menu to launch programs around Win7 in disgust of Windows' continued "helpful" reorganisation of it.
Same, and I was annoyed about it briefly. Then I realized that hitting the Windows key and then typing the beginning of what I wanted (which gives you some combination of the Run command + searching the start menu) was way faster than navigating a menu. If I need a new text file, I can type "[Windows key] n o t e [enter]" in under a second.
> The alternative to finding Paint in the start menu and then later on finding my folder in whatever convoluted network drive I'm working on to save the file, is just hitting [Enter] to open the file you just made.
The real alternative is hitting Win+R and typing mspaint
The only device this work flow seems to be natural in is Iphone (which is barely a computer). Nothing else works like that. So no, computers are not at all "app-centric". They are always file-centric.
Oh if people care about their documents and not programs, then the sure dont care what company wrote the programs! Why is the start menu full of company names and not categories?
End user here. I spend many happy hours creating Word documents. When I use a menu, I tend to use New, and then use one of my templates. I like the way it works in that it shows the last templates I have used. I would prefer if it kept track of the templates I use the most and presented them in that order.
It would be really cool if it could read my mind and knew that on Saturday mornings I normally create two specific types of document.
One of the old versions of Mac operating system (System 7 or 8?) used to have templates on the desktop. I seem to remember I just double clicked on them and it created an empty document with a the selected template. I liked that a lot.
Eventually, I have just bound a function key in Word to creating two of the types of document I use most regularly.
I have been using Emacs with deft to write text notes for some time now. I like the idea of just pressing enter and having a new empty text document. I don't have to worry about the name or where to save it.
It would be fantastic if I did not have to think about where to file documents, create the folders and move them there, and the system magically created virtual folders with content it thought should go there.
Better question: why in the hell doesn't Windows have a central settings menu for deciding what is and is not on the right click menu? Why do I have to search through the settings of fifty different programs if I want to clean it up?
I absolutely love this approach to feature inclusion and usability. User research showed that for some number of users (presumably not the majority) this is a familiar and comfortable interaction. All too often we see companies cut features (or whole products) because the metrics/analytics indicate most users don't use them - ignoring the fact that those features may be really important to the small minority.
I understand that every feature and product carries a maintenance burden, but I believe that the barrier to cutting them should be really high (especially when users build workflows around them).
I use the New context menu exclusively to make new txt files. Everything else is open the app first territory.
Explorer is weird in a few ways.
- doesn't show NTFS alternate data streams.
- hides "copy as path" behind a shift-rightClick context menu. This is handy for running scripts, but why the "shift" modifier? Same for "Open commandline/powershell" when right clicking whitespace of directory.
- copy and paste a file listing. IE a simple "dir". Or checksums to verify downloaded files. Nope, that requires 3rd party extensions.
Thankfully newer explorer has much better UX for copying/overwriting/deleting files these days.
yes, I know. I can't fix the Windows GUI, but I can try to offer workarounds. Not everyone knows all of the little things you can do, including myself.
An optional -Algorithm flag lets you choose between MD5, SHA256, etc. It's nice to have this built-in.
For 3rd party options I really like HashTab [0] which is free for personal use. It places a configurable list of hashes in right-click > Properties, with a bonus of comparing the hashes against one you might already have on your clipboard and giving you a green "OK" if it matches.
Throw a new pane into its main content preview frame, tabs on both the new and old, label them "Main stream" and "Alt stream" respectively? Something like that.
Same here. Exclusively for txt files. Especially useful because sometimes you ONLY need a txt file with a title, no content, to act as a crude bit of meta-data for a folder.
The excuse given in the article however just seems like rewarding bad behavior, and explains at least one reason why the Windows GUI is such a disaster (at this point, it's just years and years of junk accumulation as well, but even in 95 there always seemed to be at least 3 ways of doing the same thing).
That sort of multipath convenience is a dying art. That there are so many ways to accomplish a task is one of the things I admire most about Windows (and to a lesser extent Linux) GUI design
Modern app design almost always forces you into the developer's wonky custom save feature, if there is even a manual save at all, and with webapps you are forced to use cloud storage (possibly with a rental fee attached) as opposed to files on your local device. It would be really nice is everyone gave me standard open/save dialog boxes with all the OS accoutrements; I can't emphasize enough just how handy it is to be able to copy/paste, or create a new folder, or even manage files/directories or even launch programs from within a standard dialog... all because it is using the same view controls that Explorer uses!
I'll bet you wish "New Text Document" would be the first choice by now too, using most-recently-used order. Has anyone ever right-clicked and said "Yeah I want to make a new Microsoft Access Database here"?
It's too late, my muscle memory is firmly embedded. I still find myself going to where "Add/Remove Programs" in the old control panel but Windows changed it to "Programs and Features" decades ago.
>This is handy for running scripts, but why the "shift" modifier? Same for "Open commandline/powershell" when right clicking whitespace of directory.
Not a solution to your particular gripe but you can actually type "powershell" or "cmd" (minus quotes) into the address bar in windows explorer and it will open in that directory.
Further clarification: google and 3 seconds of testing advise you can run any executable in your PATH environment variable.
Though there is some other step going on as "powershell" will set the current working dir on startup. Possibly a class entry in registry defining the full command to run.
I looked into it and it is because I have a folder in "my documents" that is named "powershell". If I rename that folder typing "powershell" opens a new powershell prompt.
Another one that I use from the address bar is "subl -n ." to open a temporary Sublime Text project. I imagine you could do something similar with VS Code.
That didn't work in windows because it tries to open the unix shell wrapper "code" instead of "code.cmd" for some reason.(Because I have wsl2 installed?) Type "code.cmd ." instead works.
Yes, and there is a long standing bug. Once you have done that, if you go back to the folder window in explorer, and try to select/copy the folder path, all you will get is the path to cmd.exe instead.
In some contexts pasting a copied file pastes the full path to it. For example, copy a file, then paste into the Open dialogs name input, and you’ll get the full path to the file.
I hate that macOS got rid of the textfield for the path. You can display it only using Ctrl+Shift+G, and it opens a second popup with the single text field, but it is not working together with the UI…
Since Windows 8 added the ribbon to Explorer I've always put the copy-as-path button in the quick access toolbar (right click on the button -> Add to Quick Access Toolbar) for simple pervasive one-click access.
Apparently Windows 11's Explorer is ditching the ribbon for a simpler looking toolbar. Most people I've seen who've tried it seem to be responding positively due to the less cluttered appearance, which is understandable, but TBH as someone who actually uses a lot of the Explorer functionality I'm not looking forward to more stuff being buried.
I frequently use the right click -> new menu in Windows to create new text files in a given folder (the only thing I use it for). It would be exceptionally obnoxious if they removed that feature.
> for many users, the way they create a new file is to find an existing file of the same type, copy it, then open the copy and delete everything in it.
Cringe.
> And who among us can say they never created a new class or project by copying an existing one, and then deleting everything inside?
I can relate. I work with CADD software. Throughout the day I will jump between projects in different survey zones. It’s much faster to copy an existing file in a given zone and open it than go through menus and apply certain settings for each file. In fact, the first file I make for a project is projectname_blank. Then this gets copied everywhere.
Reusing styles is a huge valid reason. Even today Google Docs/Slides has a convenient “Make a copy” button that is easier for me compared to setting up a template.
I just copy -> rename -> open -> select all -> delete
For example, when (being dragged into) making PowerPoint presentations, I tend to manually style two or three slides (e.g. title page, chapter divider, content slide), and then create actual slides through "Right click -> Duplicate Slide".
> > for many users, the way they create a new file is to find an existing file of the same type, copy it, then open the copy and delete everything in it.
> Cringe.
you would think that all that "telemetry" would fix that (but of course the telemetry exist for other reasons)... but it doesn't surprise me that this comment is being down-voted here on HN.
yeah, even though the 'letus copy and old file and empty it' to me it shows how average users brain sees and wants to see the computer/filesystem. ex-nihilo isn't natural at their level, and copying something they handled is the path of least resistance. MS should jump on the occasion
I think this was discovered by Alan Kay and team in the 80's and resulted in the implementation later of prototype based computer languages like Self an Javascript
Xcode doesn't go that far but has the plus button in the top-right corner. Clicking it will open a list of snippets. Most language constructs are in there, if/switch/class/struct/etc.
Weird enough I never got used to it. My desire for templates is more on the implementation level. For example when I need to draw a circle, I google for "SwiftUI custom shape", then copy/paste a working example, and from there, edit the "template" until I've got something going.
> It’s interesting because copy and pasting a class gives you something humans love: a template!
That’s exactly what the OS/2 workplace shell did back in the early 90s: You had a “templates” folder where you would drag one of the many notebook-like icons and drop a brand new and empty file of the corresponding type.
When installing OS/2 programs they would register new file types and create a template in this special purpose folder. Man, that were exciting times!
Didn’t Ubuntu also support templates up to a point?
This sounds an awful lot like prototype inheritance. Turns out people don't seem to like it - it's essentially vestigal in javascript these days, most people seem to use the class system built on top of it and that was true even in the good old days before support for it was added to the language keywords. It was rare to find code that actually used prototypes as prototypes rather than slightly odd ways of defining classes.
I don't think the problem with prototype inheritance comes from whether people like creating things by taking something that already exists and modifying it. In fact, people very often use classical inheritance to emulate prototypical inheritance ("oh, i'll just add an extra method here and override that method there").
The problems normally relate to maintenance and change over time:
1. We reject classical-inheritance-emulating-prototypical-inheritance because it makes it hard to change the original. But copying a file and changing it doesn't have this problem, since the copy and the original are forks. If you need to make changes to both files, then you need to make changes to both files.
2. We prefer classical inheritance because a class is a description of how you can use an instance of that class. The class definition is usually very declarative and lends itself to great tooling support. Prototypical inheritance is imperative by its nature. This means there's no generic answer to the question, "How can I use this object", but only "how can I use this object right now?". But copying a file and changing it doesn't have this problem, since the copy and original are data, whose use is determined by external tools.
Another commenter in this thread specifically claims that prototypical inheritance was derived from this model (with a sense of optimism and joy, I think). But the fact that one extension of this model failed didn't mean the whole model is a failure. In this case, the suggestion is just to recognise what a user is doing and facilitate that. I think that's a lot less trouble than a language feature. (Actually, I think Jet Brains IDEs have a lot of features that tend towards this. They just might not be quite there.)
This rules, honestly. Seeing and making shit like this was what turned me from "CS student" to "genuinely enjoys software engineering." To this day, little stuff that makes a life better is the best part of anything I do.
Quick-n-dirty templating. The chances are the old document has all kinds of preferences set up - margins, default font, heading formats, for a word processor document. Line and stroke preferences for a graphics program, whatever. It's not as dumb as it seems.
The New File option on Windows is one thing I really miss on MacOS. I set up a macro or something that added it in for text files years ago, but it got blown away when I changed machines or upgraded a few years ago and I can't remember how I did it. I could google it, but eh. I'll just have a moan about it next time I need to do it instead. Bah, humbug!
That creates files that, when opened, create a copy of themselves in the current directory and open that.
That’s a poor implementation (a good one would open the file as a new document ¿and tell the app the default directory?), but probably the best one an do without cooperation from applications. System 7 did that better, but only for applications that supported it, as did Lisa.
This is why it's important to give any 'new' code a few passes before committing it; it's pretty likely it'll be used as a template by yourself or others for similar code in the future.
One of the features I used to love on "classic" MacOS was the Stationery Pad.
Basically you could create a file, then mark it as a "Stationery Pad". Next time you double-clicked it in the Finder, it created a copy and then opened the associated application.
Instant templating in a way that ordinary users understood.
When I catch myself doing this more than two or three times for a particular document, I save it as a template after I finish clearing everything out. If it's one I'll use often I'll stick it in my templates folder so it shows up in the new file context menu (on Linux/in Caja). I haven't figured out if there's a way to achieve the same workflow in Windows, but if there is I'd love to hear it.
I'd really like to just start making all of my multiplied documents as database forms that just pull from a central data source. I haven't found an easy way to do this that works on both Linux and Windows and can pull from a central source over the network (besides implementing it myself in php/mySQL, which is a few orders of magnitude more work than just making a LibreOffice template).
i use it as a way to generate template folder structures that are to contain files to be populated throughout their work. this shares with my team how I do my work, and supports them following my formula should they want to follow it themselves, which in experience shortcuts their onboarding time. I mean, I just touch files with extensions into existence rather than use a menu, but it's basically the same idea.
I'm pretty sure its about time that Windows guessed what I am trying to do when I am looking around inside a folder. Right-click, offer me the shortcut to create a file similar to what is already here.
They already have the obvious yet brilliant use of recent items in Outlook : compose reply, click attach file -> top of the list is that file I just edited and saved over in Word a few seconds ago.
I like what they have in some Linux desktop mangers. You get a 'templates' folder in your home directory with default empty files which you can add, change & remove line normal files. Then the new sub context menu lists those files copying them when selected.
And macOS has the "Stationery Pad" file attribute, where a "Stationery Pad" file has the semantics that whenever you open it, you're actually duplicating it and then opening the duplicate. (I believe this results in "Stationery Pad"-derived documents acting much like new blank documents in most programs, in that upon attempting to close the document, the program will force you to choose between discarding or naming the new document.)
Microsoft Office includes similar functionality with its template file types, such as (in Word, for example) .dot or .dotx, in case anyone saw that and wondered what it’s for.
My strategy with those was to make the .dotx read-only and remove delete permissions so it was also in-tact on a network drive, and office workers can double click to start a company form letter.
Thanks, good tip. You can also make the template appear in the “new document” screen under the personal tab if you fiddle with some settings and put the template in the right place.
macOS post 10.7 also has the "Locked" file attribute; and optionally auto-applies "Locked" to documents after a set interval.
"Locked" files behave similar to "Stationery Pad" files, though with slight differences in workflow. You can open a "Locked" document, but when you attempt to make any changes to it, the program will pop a modal informing you that the document is "Locked", and asking whether you want to 1. unlock the document (and then apply your attempted change to the original); 2. duplicate the document (and then apply your attempted change to the duplicate); or 3. cancel your attempted change.
"Locked" documents entirely subsume/obsolete "Stationery Pad" documents, IMHO. Locking gives you all the benefits of edits triggering a duplication of the document; while also offering you the option to edit the original if you so desire (without needing to close out of the document and modify its attributes first); and without creating unnecessary duplicates when all you wanted to do was view the document.
- Browse to a sub-directory of OneDrive using Explorer
- Right click
- Create new Word document
- Double-click on Word document
- Click title bar to see where document is stored
- Get prompted to save document to OneDrive
- Press Upload
- Copy of document is created in root directory of OneDrive
- Double-click newly created document in root directory of OneDrive
- Click title bar to see where it is located
- Get prompted to save document to OneDrive
- Press Upload
- Another copy of document is created in root directory of OneDrive
- Press file, Save as
- Press Browse
- Browse to subdirectory of OneDrive
- Press save
- Click title bar to see where document is stored
- Get prompted to save document to OneDrive
- Press Share
- Get prompted to save document to OneDrive
- Press Upload
- Copy of document is created in root directory of OneDrive
This shouldn't happen. If you create a Word document within a subfolder of OneDrive, and open it in Word, it should be saving to OneDrive with autosave enabled.
Perhaps you are using an older version of Word and/or the OneDrive client?
> Not everybody knows that the way to create a new BMP file is to open this program called Paint that is hidden in the Accessories folder of your Start menu.
That's a valid point, these same users also get confused by having a right button and context menu.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 458 ms ] thread> For people with a document-centric view of the world, programs aren’t really things that you think about. What you really work on are documents.
Okay, but I don't think people create new paper documents by photocopying an existing document and covering everything with correction fluid. The user interface of those physical document-authoring tools (typewriters, paper and pen, etc.) seem to make it quite clear how to start a new blank document.
The fact that people can't discover any other way of creating a new document on their computer is obviously a legitimate problem, but I can't see how the New menu is a particularly good solution because it doesn't seem any more discoverable than the list of document-authoring programs in the Start menu.
I'm of course in agreement that user research is vital and that not everyone is aware of what you might consider the "obvious" or "best" way to create a document on a computer. I would like to see more details about how and why the New menu came to be (apparently) the primary solution to this UI problem.
I love/hate when I hear about the covoluted ways that users use a computer in the most illogical way that apparently makes perfect logical sense to them. It's like the Stupid Criminals bit on the Tonight Show. All you can think at first hearing is surely nobody is that dumb, but yet, here we are looking at someone being that dumb. One co-worker was often heard saying "I can't fix stupid"
Especially for things like letterhead or forms. Who wants to go to a room filled with thousands of different forms, if they could just get a fresh and clean one with four simple gestures?
I think you’ve missed the key point of this article, which is that a lot of people use computers without a clear idea what programs are. They know they can double-click a spreadsheet file and have a window open that lets them do things with that spreadsheet; but to them, I guess, that’s just “what a spreadsheet file is like” and there is no notion of this thing called Excel which is mediating their experience of the file. To a person like this, “discovering the program in the Start menu” is not something that can happen within the bounds of how their ontology of computers works.
It’s a credit to the designers of Windows that they design to accommodate users like this, though it also goes a long way to explaining why Windows is so annoying to many professional computer users.
You could just as easily show them the steps on the Start menu, it’s true- but then you have the separate question of saving the file somewhere and being able to find it again later. I know from helping elderly relatives with their computer problems that “directories” are another confusing concept for a lot of people. Pointing to the Desktop and saying “save it here” makes intuitive sense and makes the file easy to find later, but to e.g. “Save As” to the Desktop from inside Word requires an understanding of the occult dual nature of the Desktop-as-a-directory and the Desktop-on-the-screen, which is an insight reserved for enlightened wizards. Using the New menu lets the user restrict all their interactions with the file system to, at worst, Windows Explorer, which is a huge simplification!
(Example of where this is coming from; once when my father, a practicing medical doctor in his 70s, needed to e-sign a PDF on an unfamiliar computer I spent about half an hour trying to explain the concept of “close the document in this app and open it in this other (e-signing enabled) app.” I could about as well have been speaking Greek, or telling a Flatlander about flying.)
Conceptually, that means I feel like I'm using services/tools to interact with this abstract 'data.' By keeping 'data' abstract, it feels less solid who owns it, who's responsible for it, and where it is. Now I'm interested in the opposite system where the 'documents' are the core concept of the device, and programs are just "things your computer/smartphone can do with this document." Really make the data feel like it's /there/ you know?
Jef Raskin's Humane Interface is like that:
"An end to stand-alone applications - every software package should be structured as a set of tools available to users on any document."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface
I'd love to see a popular device that was done that way round.
They would scrape off or erase or whitewash what was on there previously and write on top.
People wouldn't create a new file if they could just reuse an existing one.
$ touch myfile.txt
$ vim myfile.txt
You are correct.
And for me anyway, this is a benefit. When I used windows (and the same holds for google docs) I always had "New Folder"s everywhere that I'd created for whatever reason and then changed my mind or got distracted. Same with new documents. In vim, I do like to say, and it I change my mind and don't save it, I never see it again. If I touch'd it first, inevitably I'd have empty files everywhere.
With a touch first, saving the file always works.
1: https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/vim-vi-text-editor-save-file-w...
Sadly it does not save me from going and editing a system file as non-root and then trying to save... :(
If we're playing golf, this works (overwriting if the file exists):
The variant I know that works identically in pretty much every shell I've ever tried is:
And if you don't want to overwrite the file if it exists:I wonder why this feels so natural in the terminal but so annoying in GUIs. I cannot remember any specific examples, but I think there are some GUI applications that require you to select a location before you start editing a new document (maybe some audio workstations?). I remember feeling annoyed by that.
Then again, the difference between "document-centric" and "application-centric" doesn't make a lot of sense in the context of the command line because 90% of files you work with are text files anyway. There is much less coupling between document types and applications than in the GUI world.
There's no flow between the OS and application UI in most instances.
I think because we're so used being able to catalog, measure, categorize and sort our various files and directory structures, manipulate them programmatically, have our browsers or operating systems identify a particular leaf by reference or just by searching for some of the micro-structure within it (usually words) etc. etc. we tend to overlook the organicess of how a data collection grows and opt instead of producing analytics measuring it. It'd be like trying to describe a tree with tables of vector statistics about the angle and length of branch sections - it's valid in certain ways, but doesn't give you a good sense of the tree's shape or structure. It's as if we've developed a sort of techno-myopia towards the shape of our own output and activities, and approach everything by dissecting it into slices and then ranking them by various criteria.
Microsoft Bob is probably the most infamous example. An early-dot-com-era roommate worked at Xerox PARC which had its own spatial 3D file manager / management interface. There were three principle problems:
- It severely taxed the limits of available consumer hardware at the time.
- It was confusing as hell.
- It didn't solve any real-world problem(s), and made numerous others worse.
Though in fairness it did somewhat resember Doom / Castle Wolfenstein....
File or document management shouldn't be the most intensive process your computer does, it should be one of the least intensive, saving processing power for Real Work, and not being resource-starved when you actually need to use it.
The organisation(s) that seem most useful are lists, lists of lists (hierarchies), tag-based systems, or search-based systems. (The fact that file-based search remains primitive in most system is its own small wonder of modern computing, though yes, the situation is slightly improved over, say, 30 years ago.)
I think part of what made 3d and other very visual file managers so bad (or at best, very slow like Treemappers) is the effort to render everything accurately at once, which is bound to be slow across terabyte scales.
Maybe we would be better off exploring Voronoi/blob/fisheye network diagrams for representing context, with the size indicating the number of files nested within. The Carrot2 search engine implements a variation of this idea which is sometimes very useful for topic exploration.
I've had a fair bit of experience with large book archives (university libraries), and have a pretty good sense of what "a million books" looks like (a large on-campus multi-storey building might house 1--5 million books). There's a physical progression, from the words on a page (~250 typewritten, about 500 typeset), to pages in a chapter, chapters in a book, books on a shelf, bookcase, aisle, library floor, building, campus, etc.
A well-organised library gives structure to navigating that space, logically, metaphorically, and literally. And there's a lot of hard work that goes into that organisation.
Simply tossing a 3-D overlay onto a file manager ... isn't that. And most of the projects I've encountered either don't realise that, or don't give that fact its due.
For that matter, the concepts of search and locality (as in, works near each other) have entirely different manifestations online and in a physical archive. Shelf-reading is still one of my favourite pastimes.
Luckily I have the kind of memory to put things somewhere and then know where to look a year or more later, but in the last year or two I've noticed that I'm using the quick access (ie your 20 or 30 most recent files) in a very similar matter to a stack in assembler. Also a lot of my busiest folders are sorted by date rather than filename because I depend heavily on the contextual memory when I learned things.
So - for example - instead of folders you'd see the same list of popular/recent/alphabetised projects in every app.
And you could link project collections into super-projects with links and/or copies of specific data and working environments.
The nested filing cabinet + aliases metaphor is old and never really worked all that well anyway, but we're stuck with it because it was easy to implement back when all of this was first designed and computers were a thousand times slower.
Saving a file in Excel now is a huge hassle. They WANT me to save to one location in my OneDrive folder, but I hardly ever want it there.
Modern computers are trying to move away from the concept of a “desktop” or filesystem, and instead you open up the file you want from within the program that you use to open it. It would be like you have all your cds in a big jukebox that you can select from, or all your documents in a big binder, or something like that. They become isolated within the devices you use to read them.
It may be better for some people, but that is not how I like to organize things. Particularly when I want to move something from one device to another.
You can copy and paste paths between file manager and Open/Save file dialog in most instances.
Directory Opus (a file manager for Windows) somehow extends most Windows file pickers so Ctrl+G moves the file picker to whatever folder Directory Opus has open. I still feel a twinge of satisfaction every time this lets me skip re-traversing my file tree. I don't think it does anything for a Qt file picker though.
I'll often use touch just that way, in part because I can also apply standard features / functions in the process, particularly a datestamp:
Where datestamp is a bash function: In several scripts / tools, the title (and other metadata) are automatically generated and added, with sanity checks for characters, casing (lowercase preferred), and tokenisation (usually '-' between words, '_' between elements, and '--' between repeated elements, e.g., multiple authors. The results can be longish, but descriptive, filenames. With a low collision probability.Metaphors for everyday actions don’t need to be about forcing the real world into the computer world. A lot of the ways of thinking feel like they are one and the same.
Another example, for me, off the top of my head: rummaging with find and grep but then scanning the output with less feels identical to hunting for red 4x1 Lego blocks or M8 nylon locking nuts.
To me, working in a new unsaved document feels uncomfortable. The idea that your Word window would already have an underlying file in the correct folder is reassuring. You can smash Ctrl+S all you need.
I don't even put ".txt" on the end.
I am sure in my early days, I used `new > Bitmap image` and it wasn't valid so I never used it again. Infact `new > folder` and `new > text document` is all I use, and I just noticed I have many options here.
Constructing a new object is a constructor call from OOP.
Without arguments, you get some default, representative instance.
Look at Python:
New integer: representative default instance is zero:
New string: empty by default: New bool: false by default.Good news: Windows 11 simplifies context menu explorer. It won't show customized menu item by default.
Another one is that there's no toolbar button to delete files since they expect you to drag them to the trash. Please I'm not dragging files for 1000px with a trackpad as an entry-level user.
“lets you create the file directly where you want it, saving you the trouble of having to navigate through the Save As dialog just to get back to where you started.”
Why would I do that? Sure, I've copied classes and whole repositories around, then deleted most of the meat but the reason for copying instead of starting fresh is because a lot of the boilerplate and directory structure can be reused.
Deleting everything is a pointless exercise.
Either: * Cmd/Ctrl + N to open a new buffer, then Cmd/Ctrl + S to save it using th OS file picker; or * Right-click on the file browser pane on the directory to create the file, select New File and give it a name.
My main way to create new files is DEFINITELY "rightclick -> New -> *", because I usually have the directory I'm working in already open in Explorer, because that's where I'm doing my work, so I'm already there! ... The alternative to finding Paint in the start menu and then later on finding my folder in whatever convoluted network drive I'm working on to save the file, is just hitting [Enter] to open the file you just made.
(edit: Sorry OP, apparently you've touched a nerve here)
Looks like it was -I- who was dying on a hill.
Much faster than clicking through a web of deeply nested folders.
Although, of course, this doesn't work when some app has rolled their own save/open menu that doesn't allow for navigating directly to a pasted folder path.
Somewhat better than MacOS's ⌘+space+"stub that sort of works but whoops changed at the last second" functionality.
Both are poor UI, but one is a bit worse than the other.
Obviously that's not very helpful to the vast majority of users, who are mostly not techy enough to touch their registry.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/how-to...
Same, and I was annoyed about it briefly. Then I realized that hitting the Windows key and then typing the beginning of what I wanted (which gives you some combination of the Run command + searching the start menu) was way faster than navigating a menu. If I need a new text file, I can type "[Windows key] n o t e [enter]" in under a second.
The real alternative is hitting Win+R and typing mspaint
This seems outdated - computers are very app-centric now. Stuff is usually found inside an app, not a document, and the filesystem barely exists.
Which is why Google spent $$$ on a whole gTLD to enable new document creation :-)
https://doc.new, https://spreadsheet.new etc.
What is a song? A picture? A model? A script? A book? A document? All those things are files.
Apps deprecate fast and so would all the data contained within them.
It would be really cool if it could read my mind and knew that on Saturday mornings I normally create two specific types of document.
One of the old versions of Mac operating system (System 7 or 8?) used to have templates on the desktop. I seem to remember I just double clicked on them and it created an empty document with a the selected template. I liked that a lot.
Eventually, I have just bound a function key in Word to creating two of the types of document I use most regularly.
I have been using Emacs with deft to write text notes for some time now. I like the idea of just pressing enter and having a new empty text document. I don't have to worry about the name or where to save it.
It would be fantastic if I did not have to think about where to file documents, create the folders and move them there, and the system magically created virtual folders with content it thought should go there.
I understand that every feature and product carries a maintenance burden, but I believe that the barrier to cutting them should be really high (especially when users build workflows around them).
Explorer is weird in a few ways.
- doesn't show NTFS alternate data streams.
- hides "copy as path" behind a shift-rightClick context menu. This is handy for running scripts, but why the "shift" modifier? Same for "Open commandline/powershell" when right clicking whitespace of directory.
- copy and paste a file listing. IE a simple "dir". Or checksums to verify downloaded files. Nope, that requires 3rd party extensions.
Thankfully newer explorer has much better UX for copying/overwriting/deleting files these days.
I think you can do "dir | clip" at the command line or in the address bar of an explorer window to get this.
> checksums to verify downloaded files.
there is a PowerShell commandlet that does this out of the box, if I remember correctly.
But in the same way most users are not likely to "touch newfile.txt" the GUI isn't helpful.
An optional -Algorithm flag lets you choose between MD5, SHA256, etc. It's nice to have this built-in.
For 3rd party options I really like HashTab [0] which is free for personal use. It places a configurable list of hashes in right-click > Properties, with a bonus of comparing the hashes against one you might already have on your clipboard and giving you a green "OK" if it matches.
[0] http://implbits.com/products/hashtab/
As per sibling post to yours you can run executables from your PATH environment variable in the address bar.
So while you can't run "dir" directly you can run CMD and pass it dir | clip, or as I did "powershell -command ls|clip"
Nice one! Thanks for the direction!
and I often mess those up, so I'm glad I helped you, even if it was only a little bit.
How would that even work?
> How would that even work?
Throw a new pane into its main content preview frame, tabs on both the new and old, label them "Main stream" and "Alt stream" respectively? Something like that.
The excuse given in the article however just seems like rewarding bad behavior, and explains at least one reason why the Windows GUI is such a disaster (at this point, it's just years and years of junk accumulation as well, but even in 95 there always seemed to be at least 3 ways of doing the same thing).
Modern app design almost always forces you into the developer's wonky custom save feature, if there is even a manual save at all, and with webapps you are forced to use cloud storage (possibly with a rental fee attached) as opposed to files on your local device. It would be really nice is everyone gave me standard open/save dialog boxes with all the OS accoutrements; I can't emphasize enough just how handy it is to be able to copy/paste, or create a new folder, or even manage files/directories or even launch programs from within a standard dialog... all because it is using the same view controls that Explorer uses!
Not a solution to your particular gripe but you can actually type "powershell" or "cmd" (minus quotes) into the address bar in windows explorer and it will open in that directory.
Though there is some other step going on as "powershell" will set the current working dir on startup. Possibly a class entry in registry defining the full command to run.
Edit: typing powershell.exe does the trick
I have been using Windows since version 3.1, and still did not know this trick. HN is truly an amazing place!
Apparently Windows 11's Explorer is ditching the ribbon for a simpler looking toolbar. Most people I've seen who've tried it seem to be responding positively due to the less cluttered appearance, which is understandable, but TBH as someone who actually uses a lot of the Explorer functionality I'm not looking forward to more stuff being buried.
Cringe.
> And who among us can say they never created a new class or project by copying an existing one, and then deleting everything inside?
... Hey. No fair.
Start a new PCB Layout from scratch? Good luck getting the stack up and constrains correct.
1) Learn to understand that programs create files
2) Learn which program creates a .doc file
3) Learn how to open program and where the File|New command is
5) Getting all the metadata / header / footers etc. correct
I just copy -> rename -> open -> select all -> delete
For example, when (being dragged into) making PowerPoint presentations, I tend to manually style two or three slides (e.g. title page, chapter divider, content slide), and then create actual slides through "Right click -> Duplicate Slide".
> Cringe.
you would think that all that "telemetry" would fix that (but of course the telemetry exist for other reasons)... but it doesn't surprise me that this comment is being down-voted here on HN.
Now what if: for OO languages the virtual methods can be adorned with both an example basic implementation and a comment with instructions.
Then when you do the “implement abstract methods” IDE shortcut it fills in those example implementations.
Basically you are saying “they are going to copy paste anyway, let’s get them started off with a decent example”
Unles you’re referring to a more “Githubcopilotesque” solution…
Weird enough I never got used to it. My desire for templates is more on the implementation level. For example when I need to draw a circle, I google for "SwiftUI custom shape", then copy/paste a working example, and from there, edit the "template" until I've got something going.
That’s exactly what the OS/2 workplace shell did back in the early 90s: You had a “templates” folder where you would drag one of the many notebook-like icons and drop a brand new and empty file of the corresponding type.
When installing OS/2 programs they would register new file types and create a template in this special purpose folder. Man, that were exciting times!
Didn’t Ubuntu also support templates up to a point?
As far as I understand it, it's a Freedesktop.org standard.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_user_directories
The problems normally relate to maintenance and change over time:
1. We reject classical-inheritance-emulating-prototypical-inheritance because it makes it hard to change the original. But copying a file and changing it doesn't have this problem, since the copy and the original are forks. If you need to make changes to both files, then you need to make changes to both files.
2. We prefer classical inheritance because a class is a description of how you can use an instance of that class. The class definition is usually very declarative and lends itself to great tooling support. Prototypical inheritance is imperative by its nature. This means there's no generic answer to the question, "How can I use this object", but only "how can I use this object right now?". But copying a file and changing it doesn't have this problem, since the copy and original are data, whose use is determined by external tools.
Another commenter in this thread specifically claims that prototypical inheritance was derived from this model (with a sense of optimism and joy, I think). But the fact that one extension of this model failed didn't mean the whole model is a failure. In this case, the suggestion is just to recognise what a user is doing and facilitate that. I think that's a lot less trouble than a language feature. (Actually, I think Jet Brains IDEs have a lot of features that tend towards this. They just might not be quite there.)
https://sourceforge.net/projects/cppquickstart/
The New File option on Windows is one thing I really miss on MacOS. I set up a macro or something that added it in for text files years ago, but it got blown away when I changed machines or upgraded a few years ago and I can't remember how I did it. I could google it, but eh. I'll just have a moan about it next time I need to do it instead. Bah, humbug!
That creates files that, when opened, create a copy of themselves in the current directory and open that.
That’s a poor implementation (a good one would open the file as a new document ¿and tell the app the default directory?), but probably the best one an do without cooperation from applications. System 7 did that better, but only for applications that supported it, as did Lisa.
MS Word has a good implementation with .dotx files (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/create-a-template-...)
Basically you could create a file, then mark it as a "Stationery Pad". Next time you double-clicked it in the Finder, it created a copy and then opened the associated application.
Instant templating in a way that ordinary users understood.
(And yes, it still works on OSX/macOS)
I'd really like to just start making all of my multiplied documents as database forms that just pull from a central data source. I haven't found an easy way to do this that works on both Linux and Windows and can pull from a central source over the network (besides implementing it myself in php/mySQL, which is a few orders of magnitude more work than just making a LibreOffice template).
They already have the obvious yet brilliant use of recent items in Outlook : compose reply, click attach file -> top of the list is that file I just edited and saved over in Word a few seconds ago.
It's actually useful.
My strategy with those was to make the .dotx read-only and remove delete permissions so it was also in-tact on a network drive, and office workers can double click to start a company form letter.
"Locked" files behave similar to "Stationery Pad" files, though with slight differences in workflow. You can open a "Locked" document, but when you attempt to make any changes to it, the program will pop a modal informing you that the document is "Locked", and asking whether you want to 1. unlock the document (and then apply your attempted change to the original); 2. duplicate the document (and then apply your attempted change to the duplicate); or 3. cancel your attempted change.
"Locked" documents entirely subsume/obsolete "Stationery Pad" documents, IMHO. Locking gives you all the benefits of edits triggering a duplication of the document; while also offering you the option to edit the original if you so desire (without needing to close out of the document and modify its attributes first); and without creating unnecessary duplicates when all you wanted to do was view the document.
The worse part is that it is indeed incredibly useful.
New File is populated from the registry.
Perhaps you are using an older version of Word and/or the OneDrive client?
That's a valid point, these same users also get confused by having a right button and context menu.