Why Windows Explorer in Windows 8 rocks | Hacker News Reader

Why Windows Explorer in Windows 8 rocks

7tutorials.com

37 pointscarusen62 comments

It took me some time to be sure it wasn't a satirical article.

I believe it might be nice for Linux users. But most "feature" are wrong for standard user and even more for beginners.

=== my feelings:

Reason 1: contextual ribbon. Without talking about the visual attractiveness it is a complete loss of space. It is like someone saying: "Hey, you know you could do this!" "Would you want to open this image?". "Hey would you want to see the size of you hard drive?". "Hey would you want to launch your movie inside Windows Media Player given by you by Microsoft(c) for the unique and incredibly user friendly Windows 8?"

Hey losing so much space for annoying possibilities. I don't know for whom it will be useful? Annoying for power users. Noisy for new ones.

Reason 2 - Copy: ??? Incredible I can have a screen displaying how I copy a file! I confess the ability to pause the copy can be nice for very huge files.

Reason 3 - Copy path button? Yes if you are a geek and want to use the command line.

Reason 4 - Up button! Whoa!

Reason 5 - Customizing How To View Files & Folders is Dead Easy!: Just look at the screenshot! There are at least 20 different widget! _EASY_? I don't think so.

Reason 6: The Quick Access Toolbar! Yes, we didn't had enought button!

Reason 7: Searching is fixed in windows 8? Good news! Just some years after Mac and Linux.

Reason 8: Open "cmd" on the current location. Great my son and my wife will feel like "UB3R 1337!".

Reason 9: Mount ISO Disc Image. You're kidding, it wasn't here before?

Reason 10: Multile instance in multiple processes. Incredible, when the five firsts windows will be stuck I could also stuck a new one :-).

Reason 11: Easy management of Favorite folder. Incredible! I should buy windows 8 just for this incredible new feature! On XP I used ie6 to mark my favorite folders.

Reason 12: Easy copying and moving files and folders. Super! I can now click on another buttons! I love button! Give me more! Yeah, drag and drop is boring.

------

Sorry, for the general ambiance of this comment. I didn't want to hurt anybody. But seriously, it is a joke. I only hope it was really a satirical article in the end and I was trolled.

The only positives point are Reason 2, 7, 9 and Reason 10 which are bug fixes, not features.

"Make It Simple! Stupid!".

Seriously, most of these feature are anti pattern for standard user even if they seems good for many power users. Please, rename your finder: "pro-finder" and in the name of everything good in this world make a "nice, simple, minimal finder for the rest of the world!"

"Make It Simple! Stupid!" - they have such an UI - Metro.

If you read out all these new features, does it not strike you that they ARE building this for power users? I reckon Windows 8 is the transition OS, in the future MS will try get standard home users off the traditional desktop and onto Metro. There you probably won't even be able to see the file system at all...

Right.

Classic dekstop : Metro as DOS : Windows

In English?

I was just kind of doing a shorthand version of what you were saying, but in a different way.

DOS was the power users shell, and Windows was the easy to use simple shell.

Now the classic desktop is the power users shell, and Metro is the easy to use simple shell.

Very similar transitions.

I went in thinking "Yeah right", and came out thinking "whoa! that's pretty cool!"

Some of these features I regularly add to Ubuntu (Terminal session here, or mounting ISO's, for instance), and others I think are insanely important (what is with OS X having no Up Folder button? I still have such a hard time getting around without it.)

Press Cmd-Up to go up a folder in OS X (..and Cmd-Down to open a file or folder)

And with a single mouse click?

Also, closing an application with a single mouse click...

I think there is a point of diminishing returns when you are sacrificing simplicity and straight-forwardness for mouse clicks.

I want simplicity and straight-forwardness of a single mouse click.

Option-click or Ctrl-click on the name of the current folder brings down the menu. Not exactly one click, but not bad.

It might sound not bad, when you're only used to that.

Slightly off-topic but perhaps this'll help a little bit (you may already be doing this):

a. Right-click (Secondary click) on the toolbar in Finder, click on "Customize Toolbar" b. Add the "Path" icon. c. This is really useful in that you can go through the folder hierarchy, to the target folder, within a couple of clicks.

One of the things Finder in OSX inherited from Classic was very good keyboard navigation, especially in List view. (Yeah, I know the NeXT folks are all addicted to columns, but Finder's hierarchical lists are better 90+% of the time.)

E.g. command-up to go up level (to parent), command-down to go into a folder or open a document, right-arrow to disclose, left-arrow to fold, start typing to match any item, shift arrow to build a multi-select, and so on and so forth.

Most of this dates back to System 3.x.

Several ways to achieve "up a folder" effect, if you're curious:

1. Right click on the folder (so-called "proxy") icon in the titlebar, which will give you links to all the folders up to the root

2. Assuming you drilled-down into this folder from its parent, click the back button or (with a multitouch trackpad) three-finger swipe to the left.

The up button was removed in Vista/Windows 7 and has now been re-added. It's not a new feature it's just that most windows users moaned about its removal so much they've finally caved.

All the functionality you're describing is available in Vista/Windows 7.

But the up button? It's just better. You don't know what you're missing.

The big UI annoyance is that assumption in #2. Most of the time you did drill-down into this folder from its parent so "back" goes "up". But when you didn't (which could have been hours ago), you get a very jarring disorientation.

Comically, your scenarios #1 and #2 even clash with each other. If you do #1 then #2, the "back" operation goes deeper into the tree. If you navigate from C:\a\b to C:\a\b\c then to C:\a\b, the behavior of "back" is now different based on how you went from b\c to b, whether you did that by "back" or by clicking the address bar link!

The Backspace key always did "up" in older versions of Windows, but does "back" in Windows 7, which annoys me all the time. Alt-Uparrow does work consistently, but my muscle memory isn't there, and it's jarring that there's no symmetrical Alt-Downarrow operation.

>what is it with OS X having no Up Folder button? I still have such a hard time getting around without it.

Display the path at the bottom of the window (it's in the View menu I believe). You can click on any part of it so you can go up one level, two levels, whatever all the way up.

Sometimes it's about finding a different way of doing the same thing, not just looking for the exact same implementation.

Also, Cmd+Up. Or right click the folder name at the top of the window to see/select in the tree.

A lot of these options are going in the absolute wrong direction, I think. They are cool for power users, but that is such a small portion of the population. My grandma can use a Mac specifically because there are like 2 buttons for her to press on any window.

Your grandma is going to be dead soon. Let her stick with the mac, and let your sister have a better computer.

Extreme rudeness aside, you will be "your grandma" soon. Do you want to be perplexed by 2030's technology presenting tons of options inelegantly?

A good interface reduces visual clutter. Seldom used options don't belong on the front row UI seat. I wouldn't want them on a F16 cockpit, and I don't want them on my file browser.

Why is it going in the absolute wrong direction if they are good for power users? Also, why must we continue to treat the normal user as _dumb_? My mum now uses tabs in web browsers, knows a couple of shortcuts, etc. Let's promote this and not pretend they are unable to progress past using a one-button mouse. ;)

My Grandma gets along fine using Windows.

Because what you call dumb is in reality just complete lack of interest. Having that many buttons on the default view just adds to the feeling of "what in the world is all this shit"

I said nothing about the intelligence of the user. I don't care about these functions most of the time, I'm not sure why most other people would. If I'm wrong then I'm wrong, but I just don't see everyday users of computers lamenting the inability to run explorer in a new process.

I think MS is sort of splitting Windows for casual users and power-users. Casual users will eventually use Metro for everything and not use the current desktop paradigm. Will take a while though.

I thought everybody had to use Metro starting with Windows 8.

Nope there is still the traditional desktop there if you want it (although no start menu anymore). The article is showing off explorer for the traditional desktop mode.

I get the same impression. Why they feel the need to punish power users is beyond me though. Power users typically know the keyboard shortcuts and right-click menus pretty well. Adding all these buttons to the interface is just taking up space.

Point of reference, my explorer menu: http://i.imgur.com/YEXha.png

Your comment sounds a bit dated to me. Migrating these 'power user' features to the primary file manager is almost certainly a response to requests coming from middle-of-the-curve professional users.

"Reason 10: Can Run Multiple Instances in Different Processes"

I'm not sure "open new window in a new process" really belongs in a windows menu. It's just more junk that only a tiny percentage of their users will understand.

I don't think the idea of a process is anywhere in the technical vocabulary of a typical windows user.

The large percentage of users that don't know what a process is probably won't click on the right-arrow that takes you to that submenu. And if they accidentally do, they'll either hit escape, or maybe they'll google "open new window in new process" and teach themselves something.

Worse than that tt's actually an option since windows 2000 and every windows version since then, so it's nothing new he just didn't know about it. Most of the other "power user" things like "open command prompt here" have been available through power toys or such.

How do you do that in Windows 7? It would actually be useful for me on occassion, but it never even crossed my mind that I could have a new window open up in a new explorer process.

Tools -> Folder options -> View tab -> Launch folder windows in a separate process

Thanks. Not very easy to use, since I'd typically like to just use it on occassion. But at least I know it's there now.

It's already in Windows 7: Shift + Right-click in a folder. Then it's in the context menu.

User testing shows that non power users nearly always work in a single window anyway. They're unlikely to be confronted with the option at all.

One possible way of managing complexity is putting the complex parts where typical users won't need to go in the first place. The goal of the heat map work they do is to take the options that basic users know they need and set them right out front and center, so that they never need to dig into the rest of the interface and get lost in the rest of the options.

It looks incredibly complicated.

These are nice looking features. I don't always use a graphical file manager, but when I do...

...but seriously, the thing I'm the most struck by is how ugly this thing is. I guess MS blew all the design money on Metro.

Several of these features are already available in current Windows versions (perhaps less discoverable, but there nonetheless):

- "Add to favorites" is an option in the right click menu on Favorites in the left panel, works the same way as the new one on the ribbon shown in the article - "Run each window in a new process" has been around since at least XP - "Open command window here" is in the shift-right click menu already

On the other hand, several of the new features do look nice; (re)adding the Up button is good, and "Copy path" sounds very handy.

My favorite feature, which he didn't mention, is that you can now copy/move items to ancestors of the current directory by dragging and dropping into the relevant section of the breadcrumb bar.

Yes, that's a very cool feature.

I remember trying it in Vista and being disappointed that it didn't work. There were a lot of times in my old job it would've been useful.

I still use WinXP - I'm partly change averse, and partly find some things in Win7 (which I have on my laptop) more clunky than WinXP.

I happen to be in windows explorer a lot between everything I'm up to, and all of these features linked look terrific and will make me much more productive. So count me in as excited for a new Windows launch for the first time in a while.

I added Classic shell ( http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/features.html ) to Windows 7 to fix some of the clunkiness. With classic shell you can fix some of the weirdness/newest of Windows 7 explorer while getting to use some of the new features.

I'm so change averse that I still use the classic start menu (+1 for muscle memory) but Windows 7 is such an improvement over XP that's it worth moving to.

I wager "Finder" is gone by the next iteration of OSX. I think the file paradigm is on its last legs, and of all the things I wish, it is that Microsoft shored up their gumption to implement WinFS and the Cairo OOP file system work.

The fact that we're still dealing with tree/branch file systems (for the lay person) is kind of insane.

I think that "Finder" can become task / app / project centric with relatively little effort without losing the _ability_ to view things in a File-centric way.

That said, Apple doesn't do things in half-measures, so what I expect would be Finder to be deprecated ("hey, it's in Utilities") and replaced with something launchpad-like.

Windows already tried to get rid of it with libraries, but to be honest it's been a total disaster. Their libraries are so confusing but mainly because lots of software fires up retard file dialogues (I'm looking at you GTKsuck).

I don't have a problem with Windows Explorer in Windows 8, in itself, except for the way it is so jarringly different than Metro. IMO, it is recreating the X11 problem of too many UI tool kits.

Personally, I think Microsoft should consider creating a Metro based file management system.

Metro is content- and context- oriented. It will present a file browser when you need one, containing the kind of content you care about. For example, add a picture to a tweet in your Twitter app and get an image gallery. The idea is for you not to have to care where files are located.

The problem with that is many people DO care where their files are. And to have to use a jarringly different interface to manage them is asinine.

(Of course, if Microsoft doesn't do it, someone will; giving rise to 3rd party file managers just like we had back in the Windows 3.1 days.)

Straight up these mostly seem like power user features, which has no place in an interface for every day users. I feel like they might maybe be onto something with Metro, but the new explorer is two steps backwards.

> Uninstall or change a program

That's a terribly long label for an icon. This and other unnecessarily long labels are probably responsible for at least half of the "It looks cluttered" complaints.

I generally don't mind the ribbon interface -- I've gotten used to it somewhat -- but MS should really try to make the Explorer ribbon _appear_ less cluttered. In Word 2010, few of the labels take up more than one line, especially in the most commonly used tabs.

In other words, make the other ribbons look more like the "Search" ribbon (Reason 7). It just looks much better organized.

It will rock when I can have tabs in my explorer

Maybe windows power users might find all that stuff awesome, but I worry about having to explain it all to my dad over the phone

[Reason 1: The Contextual Ribbon]

Your joking. Right?

Most of this is in Win 7

A a lot of buttons on those designs. One gets used to the opposite in OSX...

Yes, but you also need to get used to the complete lack of useful file management features in Finder.

What missing features are those?

I read through the whole thing and honestly couldn't tell if it was being sarcastic or not. Just the name Explorer alone is all wrong... most users don't want to explore, they want to find. Maybe they should call it a Finder instead. Oh, wait...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com