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Comment by tablespoon | Hacker News Reader

> The "don't use icons, use words" rule resonates with me. I really dislike android drawing(and other similar) apps that present a cluttered interface with a dozen of cryptic icons.I much prefer words.

Yeah. I've used a Mac for the last few years at work, and I think the Windows task bar is unambiguously superior to the dock. A big part of that is how it integrates text, which just seem to take far less cognitive load to process. With the dock, I frequently have to pause for a couple of seconds and try to remember which inscrutably-styled circle I need to find to open the app I want.

Though a dock interface would probably be better if each app picked a distinct object to use as its icon, rather than the design-collapse we've had where all icons are either some circle or rounded square (often with a circle inside).

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I find your interpretation of the dock interesting, especially because I've never used the dock.

  - I don't use it to launch applications, I use launchpad for that.
  - I don't use it to open files in a given app, I right-click and use the contextual menu for that.
  - I don't use it to delete files, I use command-delete for that.
  - I don't use it to get to downloads, I use the Finder for that.
  - I don't use it to switch applications, I use command-tab for that.
  - I don't know what else it's good for, or what I do instead.

I say this as someone who has used Mac OS X since it launched: the dock is useless to me; I have it hidden, and if there were a way to permanently kill it, I absolutely would.

Same, I make it quite small, put it on the right, and autohide it, and it still annoys me.

To "disable" the Dock — not really: it will pop up sometimes, e.g. when some icon bounces, but anyway — you can

    defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide -bool true
    defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide-delay -float 100
    killall Dock

Here 100 is how many seconds you will have to keep the cursor on the edge of the screen before the Dock appears. You could set it to 3 or 5 should you need the Dock sometimes but don't want to trigger it by accident.

[Edit: Autohide can be toggled on/off also with ⌥+⌘+D. You can use the combination to show/hide the Dock, paired with a high autohide delay.]

Thanks! Yep, I used to set the delay to a long time, but I gave it up because my post above is a slight lie -- when something pops up in the dock to notify me, I go to the dock to see what the heck it was. That one use case caused me to give up setting a long delay because of how f'ing annoying it is for something to pop up, and then need (I think I set it to) 5 seconds to figure out what it was.

  > design-collapse we've had where all icons are either some circle or rounded square (often with a circle inside).

ive noticed this myself, now that almost all icons after bigsur have the same shape it takes me a lot longer to find anything in the dock / applications folder

this is really frustrating and disappointing to see things like this deteriorate like this and nobody seems able to stop it...

> A big part of that is how it integrates text

Interestingly, I just looked at my Win11 taskbar. The only text there is "type here to search".

I have a KDE taskbar at the same computer. It currently has a similar number of open windows, all with enough text to understand not only what application they are, but also what I'm doing there. (Except for emacs. Emacs could use some better title texts.)

> Interestingly, I just looked at my Win11 taskbar. The only text there is "type here to search".

I try as hard as I can to keep something as close to a Win 95-style taskbar as possible. I don't use Win11, I know I can do it on Win10.

I tried "combine only when full" mode for a while in Windows 7 and 10, thinking it would be the best of both worlds, but quickly realized that

1. usually I have too much open + the title captions aren't good enough for the tiny snippet that fits to be useful

2. keeping my pinned apps in predictable places is more important than saving a click occasionally

3. if I really want to see all the open windows with their titles, alt-tab or windows+tab works better for this

So I don't miss it on Windows 11, although I don't like the default centered taskbar (sacrificing (2) to move stuff around all the time for no good reason) and change this setting.

Combine only when full worked great on Win7. But Win10 was so wasteful with the startbar space that it became useless.

Have you looked at the Acme editor?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)

Which was inspired by Oberon, which had an entirely text-centric UI, with tiled windows and controlled with a mouse... and no command line.

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