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Comment by circuit10 | Hacker News Reader

I know this is sarcastic but I wonder why I haven’t really seen a ribbon interface on IDEs. It seems like a good idea

I take much longer navigating the ribbon interfaces in any recent MS Office than I do the traditional drop-down menu and toolbar UI.

Scanning a list of words is much faster than tabs of differently sized icons. Having a choice of dockable and customisable toolbars made better sense, they achieved basically the same goal and could be tailored for the current task.

I hope no one at MS takes that idea seriously.

I quite like the ribbons. It exposes a lot more control that the menu and toolbars, the contextual split makes sense and keyboard navigation works great. It's an interface you have to get used to but once you do it's actually more efficient.

I've been putting up with them for years and they still slow me down to a crawl. If you have to do anything except for the most common actions, it takes forever to hunt through the ribbon to find what you want. I curse them regularly.

I don’t know I think they are sorted fairly well and I use all the actions somewhat regularly. That’s for Excel and PowerPoint at least, no idea about Word but Word is just a poor piece of software ribbon or no ribbon.

FWIW, I hated the ribbons at first. I love them now. They are far faster than the old toolbar UI that they had prior to the ribbon due to the more recognizable items, and they've made a lot of tweaks to it over the years. You can now remove and pin your favorite things on the ribbons in MS Office, as well as make your own completely new ribbon with the buttons you want. It's a really good interface now.

I like OneNote's new Simplified Ribbon as well, that you can toggle.

Coding is a lot more modal than document composition, so I think the paradigm fits better.

Sometimes you're in "understanding the codebase and tracing execution paths through tons of libraries you don't know" mode, sometimes you're in "debugging a specific problem with a specific function" mode, sometimes you're in "designing UI" mode, sometimes you're in "figuring out event propogation" mode, sometimes you're in "writing unit tests" mode, etc ... ...

Yeah. Especially after the popularity of the MS Office ribbon when it was first introduced in the mid-2000s - I'm surprised Microsoft didn't add it to their other products. Mainly their flagship dev IDE.

Oh, please no. Ribbons are terrible UI elements.

Really? I find them better because everything is laid out in a way that makes things easier to find, especially when you haven’t used the tool much before, and they look nicer too

My problem is the opposite -- I can never find anything but the most common actions in them without engaging in a time-consuming search. This is even worse if it's a program that I haven't used before or use rarely.

This is why there should just be a search box.

The ribbon is fine if they just leave it alone and stop moving shit around and changing icons.

In one version of outlook "delete" is a trashcan, in another its a big X.

I think you must be joking

No, I like them, I don't know if it would be a good fit but it seems worth trying

Seems like ribbons are quite a divisive issue

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