Today I learned you can pause the Windows Task Manager moving apps around
theverge.com
theverge.com
The norm used to be to show shortcut accelerators right next to their menu dropdowns. That would naturally advertise those most useful to the user, without getting in the way.
Tangentially, the correct way to present nifty tips like this is NOT in a "tour of new features" wizard spammed at the user when they're opening your app to try and get something important done.
Maybe a big "pause" button next to the "end task" button would have been better, but it's not that undiscoverable. It's certainly easier to find than the option to show additional columns in the details view, like gpu memory used, the full command line, or total CPU time.
This drives me batty, and it just feels like an insult.
For decades, the argument for sticking with Windows was that it was a single stable UI/UX with lots of established conventions. The same menus in the same places, the same hotkeys worked everywhere, etc. Linux couldn't claim that, was the pitch.
Since human time is the expensive part, it didn't matter if the OS itself wasn't exactly performant, and we could afford to throw hardware at its ever-more-bloated footprint, because the investment in _human reflexes_ paid dividends whose value far exceeded some extra sticks of RAM or whatever.
Now that hardware is virtually free and it _should_ cost nothing to continue that legacy of consistency, they've fucked it all up! Teams is completely unusable by keyboard, the new UI skin got rid of all the menu bars, lately I've found GUI elements that're _hidden until you mouse over them_, like are they kidding?
I feel like I've been played for a fool. Every time I run into one of these insults, it pisses me off way more than the individual problem should, because it twists this 3-decade-old knife in my gut.
Except for windows 98 control panel, windows 2000 control panel, windows xp control panel, windows vista control panel and windows 10 control panel and system settings.
And then Microsoft let their employees use any machine/OS they wanted and all the designers promptly choose MacBooks, and now Windows is slowly morphing into macOSLite. Taking all the most annoying design concepts from macOS and trying to unsuccessfully merge or replace them with the very thoroughly designed and developed Windows conventions.
(Of course, just because it's not a shortcut to that option specifically, that doesn't mean that the current solution of not showing this shortcut anywhere is the right one.)
Not saying that as a criticism of this particular application. Discoverability is a very hard problem (which is probably why the modern trend is to just give up on it entirely). I'm glad that Microsoft didn't completely neglect it here.
Edit: Does View -> Update Speed -> Paused do what it implies? Does it pause all updates? because that's not what I want here... what I want is to stop the reordering of the items in the list, not to stop the updating of the items.
My favorite is when this happens in a tool I’ve used for years just because I have a new account flag, like signing into Slack at a new job.
Bonus points if it’s completely unskippable or keeps happening as you touch each part of the app during use.
I believe the new system was an attempt to get rid of all the cruft that has accumulated into the right click menu over the years. Notably it does not show any actions added by third party programs or file extension handlers.
Oh man, if there's any way to guarantee I won't notice your features, that's it. Please also freeze half the app and jump your wizard modal around the screen so I've no easy way to dismiss it.
And the only thing worse is games having cutscenes that explain 'feature X' in 'BOOMING EPIC VOICE' for everything I click in the menu. Looking at you, Back4Blood.
For example: in windows explorer you can start typing the name of the file and it will character by character match it to a file. This got reduced to just the first character when Win11 shipped (now fixed).
If you ever see these in an app it's a sign the team has a talent problem. People actually with talent to solve problems with the app would actually tweak the interfaces to make the tools discoverable or better. Teams with low talent (Modern Adobe etc) just work on spamming the front of house with messaging (Written in web tech that flashes up as a white rectangle first, obvs) in the hopes of changing user actions rather than actually working on the product itself.
Once I realized this I see this everywhere and the products that do it just never evolve or get better.
No walk thrus with arrow pointers and text boxes.
The bigger problem I see is that Microsoft programs don't come with adequate documentation any more like they used to (which was called "online help", though really offline in today's terminology).
It used to be delivered with printed documentation.
Yes to this. The Task Manager does have a menu entry for this (View -> Update Speed -> Paused). If they had written "Ctrl" to the right of "Paused" (as used to be the norm), it would be much more discoverable.
(Incidentally, when I hold Ctrl and open that menu, the update speed still displays what was selected before, e.g. "Low". So the Ctrl thing was probably implemented as a hack that bypasses the menu.)
This is for press and hold which has never had shortcut text associated.
I’ve been in meetings where we’re discussing adding these, and the intentions all seem to be “we want to help users find things” but they’re somehow totally ineffective at that job.
ALL the information at once, presented in a way you can’t leave or return, is just the wrong solution. I honestly think it’s just assumed these help users because someone saw some other product use it once.
They don't want to admit their monolithic UI is a mess. I miss the days when apps were much simpler and bundled together as a suite instead of one foolishly consistent... thing.
Only the old ladies waiting for retirement in the typing pool use them.
We’re web now! Two-point-oh. Electron.
And anyway, the UX designers getting half a million total comp to throw things together in artistic ways assure me that their masterworks can’t be sullied by arbitrary lines randomly strewn over their elegant typography.
The QA team didn’t complain either. How could they? We let them all go years ago! Bunch of complainers.
You know who doesn’t complain? Our happy users, especially since we’ve redirected them to a feedback forum where they can keep each other entertained and not bother us with their issues.
I mean sure, there have been a few calls by disabled users, but the UX team uses only Macs and couldn’t repro the issue.
Perhaps what you meant was solely by the engine RPM.
But you should've probably discovered View -> Update Speed :)
Edit: another example would be something like judging someone on if they remember the option name in an API call for a specific library. Trivial to google. Whiteboard interviews for stuff like this are asinine.
Hey Microsoft, thanks for the spinner, but how about instead you un-ruin right clicking in explorer and give me my corners back.
you don't actually believe this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve95Nh690l0
He's also got a new video trying to see how the NT4 Task Manager handles 32 CPU cores lol.
I pressed Ctrl+Shift+Escape to open Task Manager. And then I was confused that the list wasn't moving around. Sorted by CPU usage and still, the list just wasn't updating.
Thought I'd discovered some rare bug. So I closed task manager and then when I tried to open it up again using Ctrl+Shift+Escape, I realized the Ctrl key was already pressed.
Thank you to the grime in the walls of the key housing of my Ctrl key in my uncleaned membrane keyboard. Wouldn't have discovered this feature without you.
If discovered myself, and knowing what Windows is, I’d rather think that pressing Ctrl simply breaks the WindowProc somehow than assuming it’s its intentional function.
The only thing that can prevent me from accessing htop, is a kernel panic.
Because, even if the Desktop Environment crashes or freezes (Can't even remember the last time that happened), I can always switch to another virtual console with Ctrl+Meta+F2, login and run any program from there, including starting another DE instance.
And in the equivalent of a kernel panic in windows (BSOD), the Task Manager is inaccessible as well.
edit: disabled earlyoom & started a process that continuously allocates memory, still happens; ctrl+alt+f2 doesn't respond ever (DE ofc is frozen), and a htop over ssh gives a repaint every couple minutes if I'm lucky, but is useless; just rebooted via the physical reboot button after 30 minutes. Utterly unreasonable behavior.
On Linux the DE and shell and htop is just another program so when the system is under high memory pressure those things also get swapped out and back in when they need to run. Thrashing.
If you run something like memlockd to keep vital binaries from being swapped out I'm sure you will see that behaviour improve.
If the latter is true, it might work in explorer, too, which shuffles files around when displaying network drives or directory entries change.
Always surprised to hear this on HN. Powershell is such a better experience than any other option on windows. I think it's objecty nature scares people off, but it's really not much of a time commitment to proficiency and a fairly pleasant experience to use.
That dream is powershell.
It was death by 100 cuts, and the opaque memory management was one of the cuts. I'd say 1 drive hijacking your file system was 100 cuts. Cortana, in-menu candy crush ads/ragebait news, auto reboot, edge default opening links, more cuts.
It always shows the same processes, just the base os and the apps I installed and expressly start or autostart. There are no new obscurely named processes constantly popping up after every update. There are no rogue processes using 90% cpu, no programmes hanging and crashing the window manager.
It's just all so predictable and.. well, boring. I almost miss the excitement of never quite knowing what I would find in the window task manager.
It always amazes me how things that have been standard features in Linux Desktop environments, usually for a long time, are big news in the Windows world.
Hopefully they'll run into some friction using NTFS so we can start modifying files that are in use.
- Drag the password window around the screen furiously
- Press Ctrl-Alt-Del as you did it
I think it would just dump you straight to the desktop.
I remember doing it in Circuit City as a kid to access computers.
Faster refresh can help if you are debugging certain types of processes. (Though you probably want a real performance testing tool at some point if you are doing that a lot.)
What I miss most is the ability in earlier TaskMgr versions to select an app and Switch To that app (RtClick menu). Far more convenient way to see IF I need to kill the app or whatever other action.
It'd be really cool to have that back with this newly discovered (to us) Ctrl-to-pause function.
FWIW I always assumed anyone who really cared about this stuff was using Sysinternals's excellent Process Explorer instead.
"Randomly" is colloquially used to mean "chaotically" in a lot of contexts, and the chaotic they mean is "unpredictable enough as to seem or feel random".
When did they put that in os x? In 1.0?