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Comment by hackinthebochs | Hacker News Reader

With huge monitors becoming the norm, having important click targets aligned to corners makes little sense.

It doesn’t? Because I think it’s easier to throw the cursor at the absolute corner of the screen and click rather than have to carefully select a button somewhere along the X axis. Just a thought, I’m a macOS user myself.

I use both windows and mac and I agree. It's why I hate that the menu bar on mac can't be moved (it clashes with the window buttons), and why I don't ever use the dock (I cmd+space for spotlight instead). Hopefully this is customizable

I agree it is easier to throw your cursor at the corner than to precisely target near the corner, but I would rather have the important click targets nearer to wear my cursor already is. I have a 34 inch ultrawide monitor and my cursor is more often near the center where my active focus is. When I want to switch apps, it's easier to move the cursor down rather than diagonal to the lower left corner.

Moving to the corner requires a swipe, pickup, and swipe. Moving the mouse to the bottom can be done in a single swipe.

Or just press the windows key on the keyboard. It’s amazing how many people on windows use the mouse as the only ui input. After years of working with a mac and linux, I get cramps in my hand when working with mouse for too long.

> Moving to the corner requires a swipe, pickup, and swipe

I've got an ultrawide and it doesn't require that at all; moving the start menu to the center to compensate for bad mouse speed settings is like reducing display resolution to compensate for bad text/icon size settings.

Moving the mouse to the bottom centre means I have to find the cursor.

My eyes aren't good enough for that all the time, and sometimes, the cursor is hidden, so it doesn't even matter.

Getting to a corner has a predictable way to get there

Fitt's Law says that is exactly backwards. It is when your monitors are largest that you need the largest click targets. It's when things were 640x480 that small targets were easiest to hit.

Bigger, yes. But the issue here is where to position the target area. The less you have to move your cursor to reach frequently accessed targets, the better (as someone who doesn't use mouse accel this extra distance is very noticeable).

But the corners are far away. Testing just now, it took two swipes to get my mouse where the start button would be. It took one to get to the dock.

Resolution has nothing to do with physical size, because modern higher resolution screens typically have higher dpi

Fitt's Law is resolution-independent.

The only people using ultrawide monitors (techy people) are the same ones that use the windows hotkey and search, press enter. No mouse movement needed. The UI scale can be changed as well if we are talking about size and not aspect ratio.

Edit: Alt+Tab too.

I agree that the start menu isn't an issue, but switching between apps can be. I'm personally not a fan of alt-tab because it requires more thought which breaks flow compared to clicking on an icon which is generally in a fixed position.

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