Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

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We realize that folks that have been using WinDbg for 20 years are likely to not be interested in a new UI, but we face 20 years of legacy code every time we want to add a new feature to the UI.

You can rewrite the UI code so it's easier for you to work on internally, but to the user it looks and acts like it was before --- but proceed cautiously[1]. I'm not against adding features and TTD sounds extremely useful, but having in the overview page some slight contradictions and a screenshot of a dumbed-down UI with obvious WTFs like the two duplicate lines really soured the first impression for me. (Looking at it again, I now see the path in the titlebar has been cut off, despite plenty of empty space after it...)

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

What duplicate lines are you talking about?

The debugger isn't written from scratch, just the UI. All of the underlying functionality is essentially the same, just in a more usable shell, and if you collapse the ribbon and retheme the UI to look like the 90s, you could almost squint and think it was the old WinDbg. The change is clearly very polarizing, but we're nearly at parity with what you could do in the old WinDbg UI, and we've already been able to give people features that we could have never dreamed of supporting in the old UI (not for lack of trying). The JavaScript support is just one example.

(Also, the cut-off title bar was an issue in the Fluent.Ribbon component we use, and I think it's fixed in an updated version that we're taking soon)

> What duplicate lines are you talking about?

I'd guess that userbinator is referring to the ribbon items "Command", "Memory", and "Source" where the group name on the ribbon has been given the same name as the single menu below it (in contrast to something like Word where the contextual ribbon items for a table are Table, with Design and Layout as children).

Oh OK, that makes sense then. Yeah, that's been fixed in current internal builds and will go out on the store soon.

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