Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

devblogs.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 250 posts

Re: IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

#241

Post by bigibas123 »

foxglacier wrote: post #141
bigibas123 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brendan Eich was making a point about the tab key also being used to switch to different text fields and buttons. This makes it difficult to type in certain applications. A space doesn't have that issue. About your point of tab being represented different on different systems: It will always be ascii 9, how it's draw does differ between text editors but I consider that one of it's strengths for programming. Everyone…

Having a non-standard size is exactly the reason the tab character (not the key) is unusable. If you accidentally get some space indenting anywhere in the same project as tabs, then it'll be misaligned on someone's editor and they'll "fix" it, making it misaligned on someone else's. Trying to never use space indenting is impossible. Never copy and paste from anywhere else, never manually align multi-line statements,…

IMHO, issues with formating, like the ones you describe, should be cought by a linter. Or even better yet, enforce format-on-save in all editors your team uses and have it automatically re-indent and reformat the code so what indentation it was originally indented with irrelevant. I think this approach would work, but I tend to work on files < 10k LoC, it might get annoyingly slow past that.

Re: IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

#242

Post by voxic11 »

kelvinjps10 wrote: post #228
nomel wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very legitimate question: In the US, where is it not? Public buses aren't safe, clean, or timely. Where I am, it's 2.5 hours rather than a 26 minute commute by car. The only reason you ride one is usually if you are already in the proximity of your destination, especially if that destination is downtown. For all other cases, private or ride-share makes way more sense. We're talking buses here, not shuttles,…

In other countries most people use public transportation and small percentage uses car

Many in the US also use public transportation when they can but busses are generally thought of as a last resort. Unlike trains, teams, or subways their schedule is at the whim of traffic. So the general thinking is that if you are going to be stuck in traffic anyways you might as well be comfortable in your own car if you can afford one.

Re: IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

#243

Post by rbanffy »

twoodfin wrote: post #237
badsectoracula wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is: this one. Win95's UI was so incredibly influential that stuff introduced by it are still around to this day.

I think that’s right, but it’s fair to point out that Windows 95 was (if you believe Steven Sinofsky, who should know) heavily influenced by NeXT! https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/009-passwo...

The use of recessed surfaces for displaying information and the rectangular buttons were very NeXT-like, but more compact because it needed to work at VGA resolutions, but I don't think they managed to capture the essence of their framework which is, impressively, still alive in every Mac sold.

I wonder how hard it would be to get NeXT source from the 1990's and compile it on macOS 26.

Re: IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

#244

Post by rbanffy »

ThrowawayB7 wrote: post #197
rbanffy wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft advanced the state of UI and UX more than anyone else in the '90s. There is no universe where that is true.

And the contemporaneous counterexamples are what? The various UNIX windows managers and X11? System 6-8 on the '90s Macs? None of those were great UI/UX IMO.

The big thing I remember from Windows back then were contextual menus (Windows 95 vs MacOS 8), the Start menu and Explorer (Not sure why the Mac never developed one - apps were easier to find, I guess) with a folder tree on the left, which Finder lacked (but you could always have two windows with different views). In general, the user experience with Macs was smoother than with Windows, with the move to PowerPC being a huge improvement in performance over the 68040 models.

As pointed out elsewhere, NeXT broke a lot of new ground at that time, thanks in part to its Unix underpinnings. Also Adobe brought great font management to both PCs and Mac before both embraced TrueType. Next had sub pixel anti-aliasing from the start.

Re: IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

#245

Post by OhMeadhbh »

vincent-manis wrote: post #130
OhMeadhbh wrote: post #52

The thing I find funny here is that MicroSoft in the 80s and early 90s was a scrappy bunch of hackers trying to get something out the door. But over time they've sort of become IBM. Based on the way things have progressed... Microsoft has become IBM. IBM has become CA. Apple has become Microsoft. Oracle has become DEC (if DEC had a few more lawyers.) Amazon has become Oracle.

So who became Xerox? (i.e., brilliant ideas, thrown away at the corporate level)

Xerox was a weird mix. Insightful enough to fund PARC, but blind enough to not understand the computer market. There's a section in "Fumbling the Future" describing how Xerox higher-ups could not figure out why people thought the Alto, with it's bit-mapped / mouse-based interface was in any way different from SDS/XDS minis with a set of front panel switches and serial terminals hanging off the back.

MSFT maintains a research arm (MSR) which routinely produces interesting concepts. Not that they would ever try to turn them into products. So maybe MSFT also turned into Xerox.

Re: IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

#246

Post by BrendanEich »

tuetuopay wrote: post #93
donatj wrote: post #14

As someone who prefers tabs (I'm not looking to argue), I once asked Brendan Eich on Twitter why he prefers spaces. His answer was more thoughtful than I'd expected. The tab key itself is hijacked by modern OS/UI behavior. It makes it complicated to actually type literal tab characters in certain contexts, particularly in the browser. I still prefer tabs (and I'm a Go developer), but he is absolutely correct about th…

Yeah but, even ones that don't use literal tab characters use the tab key to write code, right? RIGHT? Like, does he hit space N times? I somewhat get the argument, but if you're writing code in the HN textarea you're doing something wrong (for code where tab/space matters anyways). Like, any code editor will use the tab key properly. Though, it sills maddens me there's no somewhat universal tab-entry in OSes like we…

Who "he"? I :set et (expand tabs) in vim :-P.

Re: IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

#247

Post by OhMeadhbh »

donatj wrote: post #118
OhMeadhbh wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want source code indentation to be random on different machines? I guess. That would make me crazy.

Yes. That is the point. I can have my tabs look the way I like them. You can have your tabs look the way you like them.

Think of it as tabs are set to 0 spaces, and then additional space characters are added to ensure lines indent to the columns you want them to line up to. And then you delete the tabs at the beginning of the line.

Re: IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

#248

Post by [deleted] »

1718627440 wrote: post #219
Nition wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a Linux subsystem for Windows so we'll call it Windows Subsystem For Linux.

It's not a part of Linux, so it can't be a Linux subsystem. It is a part of Windows, so it is indeed a Windows subsystem. Also it started/replaced a part of the NT kernel called a Subsystem, so it is called a Windows Subsystem. I don't know where that strong objection to this particular name comes from. MS does do weird things with names, like with Live, .Net or CoPilot, but this isn't one of those, but in fact named…

[deleted]

Re: IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

#249

Post by badsectoracula »

twoodfin wrote: post #237
badsectoracula wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is: this one. Win95's UI was so incredibly influential that stuff introduced by it are still around to this day.

I think that’s right, but it’s fair to point out that Windows 95 was (if you believe Steven Sinofsky, who should know) heavily influenced by NeXT! https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/009-passwo...

I know about the theme, i'm using Window Maker which uses a theme closer to NextStep and occasionally i hack on a toolkit[0] that has a Next-ish look (and feel, to some extent).

However i meant stuff like the desktop metaphor (Macintosh also had one but Win95's approach was more popular and mimicked in other environments), the start menu, the taskbar, etc, some newly introduced controls like tabs (i think OS/2 had tab-like controls/containers but they worked differently to those in Win95 and nowadays pretty much all tabs work like in Win95).

[0] https://i.imgur.com/yaU5OLn.png

Re: IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

#250

Post by badsectoracula »

rbanffy wrote: post #210
badsectoracula wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is: this one. Win95's UI was so incredibly influential that stuff introduced by it are still around to this day.

I don't really remember many Windows 95 firsts. One I remember is the ability to switch users without logging off. MacOS famously copied that (with a 3D cube look). I think they made something really revolutionary at the IE3 time. Their News and Mail app was an Explorer extension that placed an e-mail reader as the presentation of a folder full of folders of mailboxes and messages. You wouldn't see the extension, as…

I meant UI stuff like the desktop metaphor (Macintosh also had one but Win95's approach was more popular and mimicked in other environments), the start menu, the taskbar, etc, some newly introduced controls like tabs (i think OS/2 had tab-like controls/containers but they worked differently to those in Win95 and nowadays pretty much all tabs work like in Win95).
Post reply on HN