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Comment by falcor84 | Hacker News Reader

The first example provided in the article (indeed the first sentence) is “How do I double click?”, and I want to focus on this.

As a kid in the 90s, I just took double clicking as a necessary evil. But after many many opportunities of trying (mostly successfully) to teach it to both the elderly and to kids, I've gradually grown to hate it. It's such a horrible gesture, difficult to perform, complicated to reason about and entirely disconnected from any real-world metaphor.

May double clicking die off and vanish, never to be found again, except for in the annals of bad ideas.

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I often encounter people having issues double-clicking.

Actually, a lot of people have trouble just single-clicking, so double-clicking is even more of a challenge.

A lot of people just can't get the knack for clicking twice in quick succession. And the inconsistency between when they should single-click and when they should double-click causes a lot of confusion.

I think it probably would make life easier to get rid of the double-click.

The other week my Dutch language teacher (he's ~55) wrote an email "I would like to try Linux, can you please assist?" after learning about what is open source and libre software. I was pleasantly surprised to receive his email. So last week I went to install Fedora 28 on his new laptop. It all went smoothly. No, that's a lie; I had to do a little scary command-line surgery while he watched me do it (and heard me assure he doesn't need to do anything like that).

I set up all the requisite things, and since it was his first time, we went through a few common desktop workflows tailored to his needs. There I noticed: he was single-clicking where he needed to double-click—e.g. while opening a directory. I briefly explained the differences between the two and we tried again. He got better, but still struggled. I biked back home wondering if he'll continue to struggle with the double-click. :-(

I changed to single-click (and select-on-hover) a few months after moving to Linux, and won't come back, maybe your prof would like it too?

Hmm, I didn't consider that. I'll write to him to ask how it's going, and will suggest if he would like to try this.

Thanks for the idea.

Maybe Ubuntu would be more appropiate as a first time distro? I use Ubuntu because I end up frustrated having to google a million issues whenever I use any other linux distro. I grew up on windows desktop and can't really see any but the most determined ipad user from sticking with ubuntu let alone anything else.

I considered it, but Fedora is the beast I know for ~10 years, and I could debug it more confidently if something breaks (and I know I'll inevitably be called for tech support). Also, I've had "great success" with Fedora on my Father's (age: 67) desktop for already 3+ years; so I "built on top of that".

My professor's use cases are quite simple: writing articles in Libre Office (he's already familiar with it on Winblows), YouTube, and a browser—only one tab at a time; he was blissfully unaware of the concept of tabs until we walked through it!

> And the inconsistency between when they should single-click and when they should double-click causes a lot of confusion.

There's a lot of anecdotes about how uneasy/annoyed/bothered it can make you feel when watching someone unfamiliar with a scroll wheel instead mouse over and slowly click+drag the scrollbar, but the big one for me is seeing someone double-click on a hyperlink...

In my experience, dragging the scrollbar slowly hasn't been an issue I've seen. What I have seen people do is drag the scrollbar really quickly and end up at the bottom of the page, when what they want is in the middle. They correct this by dragging the scrollbar sharply up, but they're now back at the top of the page. Rince, repeat.

I also see people use the arrow buttons on the scrollbar. But they just click the button repeatedly instead of holding it down. Which means that for a very long page, it can take them a long time and hundreds of clicks to get to the section of the page they want to see.

I think it was Windows 98 or maybe ME where Microsoft tried to make everything a single click. People hated it so MS went back to the double click method.

The desktop enhancements (Active Desktop?) that came with Internet Explorer 4. You could install that on Windows 95 and get "almost Windows 98" that way. I liked it and kept it this way for years to come. In Windows 10 it's still an option you can turn on but one day I just did not bother to turn it on on a new installation.

Thank Jobs for that. Two physically, visibly, distict buttons were ‘too complicated’, so instead the second action is invisible and undiscoverable.

(Jobs also stuck us with the invisible fragile clipboard in place of the Star copy/move pattern.)

That being said my mum has been using actual computers for 20 years now (without understanding more than just what she needs), and she double-clicks on everything, even when a single-click should apply. “It works that way”. True.

Wouldnt work for something that toggled on a single click.. e.g checkbox

I think it was the idea that single-clicking in the desktop is a select action, while a double click is an "open/navigate" action.

It makes sense to me.

Until you have someone double-clicking on browser links (and other things) because that's how you open stuff in a computer, as I've seen multiple less-experienced people doing it.

well, I always found it a hassle to select texts in web documents for that reason. want to search a word in a hyperlinked headline? meh, the browser decides to open the link. even worse on touch enabled devices. double clicking stuff to open it does make sense, especially if they are more than just buttons.

Alt + select is a standard now in all major browsers.

This is like showing fire to a caveman. Holy crap. I wish Firefox had a tooltip when I'm "dragging" links to say "Hey, I bet you're trying to select!"

Well today I learned something. Thank you !

I actually added protections in some of our internal software against that recently.

People (professionals with a lot of experience) would open orders or product sheets twice (two new tabs) and it created issues. So now, you can't double click.

Once you click something, it is disabled for a few seconds.

I still hear double clicks, but now it doesn't create any bugs.

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