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Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for?

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Re: Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for?

#31

Post by userbinator »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #5
tarikozket wrote: post #4

Earlier 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…

Interesting contrast of design philosophy:

Mac - "It just works. We refuse to believe that it doesn't."

Windows - "It mostly works, but when it doesn't, press this button."

Re: Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for?

#32

Post by userbinator »

gusmd wrote: post #30

Like other people said, it is about refreshing the view for changes that didn't trigger an automatic refresh. If you dig the details, behind the scenes an API called ReadDirectoryChangesW is called, which uses a notification-like system to report changes within a directory. However, that API is weird, so various types of changes are not correctly reported and explorer.exe is stuck with outdated data. The refresh forc…

From the documentation: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...

If number of bytes transferred is zero, the buffer was too small to provide detailed information on all the changes that occurred in the directory or subtree. In this case, you should compute the changes by enumerating the directory or subtree.

I suppose that's the case when Explorer gives up, because for this to work it would require keeping a copy of all the directory contents to compare with, and "enumerating" would be unacceptably slow.

Re: Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for?

#33

Post by ipp »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #22

You could refresh any folder in Explorer, not just your desktop. It's not just about Active Desktop 'michaelt mentioned (which had a refresh, but I guess it was a different refresh, coming from IE and not explorer.exe), but - as 'UnoriginalGuy hinted - because Explorer could, and often did, go out of sync for various reasons. It didn't affect only networked drives, it happened equally well when you had enough many fi…

I've still run into these quirks on 8.1, particularly when deleting files outside of the Desktop itself (e.g. through other programs/command line, maybe Explorer).

Re: Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for?

#34

Post by chc »

click170 wrote: post #8
tarikozket wrote: post #4

Earlier 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?

Isn't the Mac equivalent CMD+R? Not on my Mac to check at the moment but as an NFS user, I remember this working for me in the past.

Command-R in the Finder is "Go to the original of an alias".

Re: Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for?

#35

Post by chc »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #5
tarikozket wrote: post #4

Earlier 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…

Huh, none of these show the workaround I've always used: create a new folder and delete it. That's been my "pseudo-refresh" for years, because it's relatively quick to type command-shift-n, command-delete.

Re: Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for?

#36

Post by Retra »

userbinator wrote: post #31
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting contrast of design philosophy: Mac - "It just works. We refuse to believe that it doesn't." Windows - "It mostly works, but when it doesn't, press this button."

For a company so self-infatuated with design, they sure did a great job making Finder a frustrating and near-useless piece of software.

Re: Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for?

#40

Post by arthulia »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #27
moberemk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An example of this: One thing that Windows versions up to at least 7 have always had issues with is that when you rename a file to be the same name with a slightly different case, say after changing an uppercase letter to a lowercase one, Explorer doesn't seem to pick up on the change until a refresh is manually triggered.

Oh, and here I always thought it just doesn't rename the file at all. NTFS is case-sensitive but Explorer is only case-preserving, so I thought it was just assuming I typed in the same name. When I wanted to change the case of a file name, I always renamed the file first to something else, eg. "Foo.txt" => "bar.txt" => "foo.txt". Thanks for the information :).

NTFS is case aware, but not really case sensitive.
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