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Comment by philjohn | Hacker News Reader

I worked for a company that made software for libraries (public and academic). It evolved over many years, starting off as a terminal session onto a mainframe.

The newer windows version still kept every single keyboard shortcut, because it turns out once you know the shortcuts, it's so much faster than pointing and clicking.

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Developers paying attention to keyboard shortcuts is a fit-and-finish metric. I'd even go so far as to suggest it's a good indicator of whether the developer actually cares about their users.

Windows itself did a great job of keyboard shortcut consistency through Windows 7. Windows 8 and beyond, however, have been less so.

Pressing ALT-F4 while Windows Explorer has focus on Windows Server 2019 and finding that you're rudely logged-off with not warning (which has something to do with UAC settings, and can be replicated on Windows Server 2012 R2 w/ the "Desktop Experience" feature enabled) gave me a very "Gee, these guys really don't care about me" kind of feeling. There are others, but they're not coming to me right now.

This is probably happening because it takes a lot of effort to get a keyboard controlled interface right. When everything is controlled by mouse you can separate concerns more easily. We had to put some thought into our state management which is even harder in the browser than it is on the desktop.

That's weird, apparently in Win10 and 8 you should still see a confirmation dialog, so I'm surprised why 2012R2 and 2019 wouldn't:

https://winaero.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/shutdown...

https://www.tenforums.com/attachments/general-support/241264...

Also on server editions of windows, the system (by default) will ask for an "unplanned shutdown" reason, which is another modal you have to go through before it actually shuts down.

Here's some discussion about it: https://serverfault.com/questions/967452/windows-server-2019...

It only happens on Server 2012 R2 when "Desktop Experience" is enabled and you're logged-on with an account that would have groups stripped from its token by User Account Control.

I've no doubt it's related to UAC, ultimately, but I've nearly reached the breaking point w/ my disgust with being unpaid outsourced QA for Microsoft. Deploying and supporting their products have been my livelihood for 20 years, but the "new Microsoft" in the Windows as a Service era is straining my ability to recommend them.

That explains why I've never encountered it, and why it may have gotten past MS' own testing --- I know MS employees who use the server edition of Windows on their development systems, but almost everyone turns off UAC because it's such a pain to work with.

Interesting. I've had the opposite experience. I really enjoy the keyboard experience in Windows 10.

Win+Shift+S to take screenshots, Win+Tab for the expose-style view of all windows, Ctrl+Win+L/R to change desktops, etc.

I haven't used Windows Server since 2012R2 was the new hotness (the product that ran on it has since been ported to dotnet core and containerized) so maybe that explains my differing experience.

Meanwhile I disabled Win+Tab (`#Tab:: Return` in an AutoHotkey script) and also three-finger swipe which defaulted to opening the same view, because it is so astonishingly slow, and easy to accidentally trigger when Alt+Tab or two-finger swipe were intended. On my Surface Book, when I have a fair bit running (call it 20+ windows and approaching full use of main memory), the first invocation of that could make the machine unresponsive for 10+ seconds, because that Win+Tab thing uses inordinate amounts of memory (well over half a gigabyte for that many windows on a 3000×2000 display, if they’re all maximised it’ll be closer to a gigabyte), so it has to shuffle loads of memory around first. Even subsequent openings of it tend to take half a second at best, more typically 1–2 seconds.

Meanwhile, I believe macOS’s equivalent transitions smoothly and quickly. Not that I’ve used it myself for fifteen years or so.

Yeah when I was running Windows 10 on a laptop I disabled animations for this reason. It helped _a bit_ but it was still janky. I only saw this when running external monitors though.

Now my only Windows 10 PC is an overpowered desktop so no issues.

Though running Ubuntu (really digging 19.10) has a noticeable hit to battery life. You really can't win..

100% agree - I remember in 2008 being not a fan of the Mac, and then being taught how TIGHT their keyboard shortcut integration was across the system, how you could customize any menu with shortcuts, how they exposed their menus programmatically - that stuff blew my mind about how much the OS cared about the user.

Havent seen nearly as much stuff in OS X these days that makes me think the same.

>Windows 8 and beyond, however, have been less so.

While they didn't stick too well to the old paradigm in detail, they introduced ribbons in Windows 8 Explorer, which are keyboard-friendly and very "vimperator-alike", using modal hints for commands (press Alt in Explorer to see how it's different), and support the quick toolbar. That's a massive improvement on itself, compared to the old accelerators. There were also many other keyboard-friendly improvements like the basic window tiling and separate desktops, ability to cycle tray icons, almost every OS setting being accessible from the console instead of GUI, etc. I'd say Windows 8 was the first Windows version somewhat usable without a mouse, in Windows 10 they improved on it (and made a huge step back with WPF applications).

The fact that shortcuts have become less and less discoverable, and nobody has cared enough to educate users, is the cause of an incredible amount of lost productivity.

"User friendliness" is paternalistic and limiting. You want a learning curve that amplifies the user's power as they progress along it.

> is the cause of an incredible amount of lost productivity.

I want to believe. Source?

Rectal extraction. (i.e., pulled out of my butt because I too want to believe.)

Yeah I really do love that. Once you get a grasp on it, you can control it blindly. I'm so quick on our UI right now, that you sometimes don't even see the command line opening. I think this efficiency combined with modern design has great potential.

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