To add to the comments about file listings not refreshing, note that the desktop is just a fancy-looking Explorer file listing widget ("control" in Windows-speak).
Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for?
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Re: Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for?
#12To add to the comments about file listings not refreshing, note that the desktop is just a fancy-looking Explorer file listing widget ("control" in Windows-speak).
I think in the past you could even switch it to column or detail mode by sending appropriate messages ;)
Re: Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for?
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand but isn't it very odd to give end-user a button like that? Also, why Mac OS didn't have one?
OS X indeed lacks it, and it is a pain in the butt to some: http://osxdaily.com/2013/08/30/refreshing-finder-windows-in-... http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/60119/how-does-the-... As you can see people have to come up with quirky workarounds to force refresh a folder on OS X, rather than just clicking a context menu button helpfully provided. Others have created third party software to add it: http://www.macu…
Two other things that cause Finder to show stale data:
- change the icns file inside an app
- enable 'calculate all sizes', then delete a file in a subdirectory
There's no easy way to refresh due to the various levels of caching involved. Closing and reopening windows doesn't help. In the icns case, not even killing Finder helps. So I assume that even if Apple wasn't fundamentally opposed to a refresh button in the UI, it would be non-trivial to implement the back button.
Re: Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for?
#14In the past when CRT monitors were in usage,the ui needs to be painted on the screen.The crt technology refreshes screen so that pixels can work properly.If they are not refreshed,then some pixels become 'dead'.
Re: Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for?
#15In the past when CRT monitors were in usage,the ui needs to be painted on the screen.The crt technology refreshes screen so that pixels can work properly.If they are not refreshed,then some pixels become 'dead'.
That happens at a much, much lower level than we're talking about here.
Re: Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for?
#16To keep the non-technophiles occupied while they wait for their external device to be detected, and to soothe them by giving them something to do (repeatedly) to "speed up" their ageing computer.
Re: Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for?
#17It is possible, although rare, for Windows Explorer to get out of sync with what exists on the file system or virtual filesystem(s). The refresh button re-acquires the data from the source and re-draws the result for the user. For example, if you open a network share, delete a file using another machine that file might take between several seconds to a minute to disappear visually (although if you try to use the file…
I've seen cases where windows explorer will arbitrarily decide to stop updating an entire folder tree for no apparent reason, at which point being able to push F5 suddenly becomes very handy. Of course, it doesn't help when I tell explorer to create a new folder which doesn't show up , thereby making it impossible to assign it a name until you refresh and then find the "New Folder" you just created.
I guess it's more handy to refresh instead of navigating out of a folder and going back in.
Re: Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for?
#18Back in Windows 98 there was a feature called 'Active Desktop' that could use web pages as desktop wallpaper (or partial desktop wallpaper). It was intended to be an early version of desktop widgets like stock tickers. As these were basically web pages, you could refresh for the same reasons you might refresh in a web browser.
As you could execute javascript it was also possible to do things like change your desktop wallpaper when you resized or rotated your screen. But active desktop was never heavily used enough to have all the bugs in it sorted out - if you widget's javascript tried to display a message box you could trigger a crash, for example.
I assume that feature is gone now - but presumably you can still put files on the desktop, so presumably there's a refresh button in case you have some strange configuration like your desktop folder mounted from a network share.
Re: Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for?
#19Back in Windows 98 there was a feature called 'Active Desktop' that could use web pages as desktop wallpaper (or partial desktop wallpaper). It was intended to be an early version of desktop widgets like stock tickers. As these were basically web pages, you could refresh for the same reasons you might refresh in a web browser. As you could execute javascript it was also possible to do things like change your desktop…
Also it had horrible performance. Even without any active desktop content, just having it enabled was enough to make any desktop interaction painfully slow compared to having it disabled.
Re: Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for?
#20It is possible, although rare, for Windows Explorer to get out of sync with what exists on the file system or virtual filesystem(s). The refresh button re-acquires the data from the source and re-draws the result for the user. For example, if you open a network share, delete a file using another machine that file might take between several seconds to a minute to disappear visually (although if you try to use the file…
All file notification systems tend to be somewhat race condition prone, or to lose events under some circumstances. Linux has a lot of different subsystems, none of which always work https://lwn.net/Articles/604686/