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Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

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Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#271

Post by hamasho »

physicles wrote: post #86
uhoh-itsmaciek wrote: post #58

In text boxes in some applications, enter submits the entered text, and ctrl-enter forces a newline (not at my computer, but I think Slack does this). In others, it's the other way around (pretty sure GitHub does this for comments). I don't know how we got here and I don't know how to fix it, but "bring back idiomatic design" doesn't help when we don't have enough idioms. I'm not even sure if those two behaviors are…

In Slack it can get even worse. If you turn on Markdown formatting, shift+enter adds a new line, unless you’re in a multi-line code block started with three backticks, and then enter adds a new line and shift+enter sends the message. I can see why someone thought this was a good idea, but it’s just not.

The worst part is if I paste markdown it's not formatted automatically.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#272

Post by lmm »

skydhash wrote: post #247
lmm wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Open the inspector, select an element and you will find all the styles that apply. That tells me which styles apply to an element. You also need the converse - find which elements a given style applies to - and there's no way to do that AFAIK. It's very hard to ever delete even completely unused styles, because there is no way to tell (in the general case) whether a given style is used at all. > This way, your styl…

> You also need the converse - find which elements a given style applies to - and there's no way to do that AFAIK. I've never needed to do this, because I pay attention to my DOM structure and from CSS selectors can figure where a style applies. But I've just checked and the search bar for Firefox Inspector supports css selectors. > In my experience the DOM doesn't have semantics, or to the extent that it does, they…

> As an example, the structure of HN's reply page

Is made up of table tags, which the CSS people will tell you is wrong/impossible/has different semantics.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#273

Post by eviks »

skydhash wrote: post #233
lmm wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cascading Style Sheets recently and I think it's the missing piece we've been looking for. It lets you declaratively specify layout in a composable, hierarchical system based on something called the Document Object Model in a way that minimizes both clientside and serverside processing, based on these things called "stylesheets" I tried that and it was an absolute nightmare. There was no way to tell where a given s…

> There was no way to tell where a given style is used from, or even if it's used at all It's pretty easy. Open the inspector, select an element and you will find all the styles that apply. If you didn't try to be fancy and use weird build tools, you will also get the name of the file and the line number (and maybe navigation to the line itself). In Firefox, there's even a live editor for the selected element and the…

> It's pretty easy. Open the inspector, select an element and you will find all the styles that apply.

Of course it's not easy, 80% of that list will be some garbage like global variables I would only need when I actually see them in a style value, not all the time.

The names are often unintuitive, and search is primitive anyway, so that's of little help. And the values are just as bad, with --vars() and !important needless verbosity in this aborted attempt of a programming language

Then there is this potentiality more useful "Computed" styles tab, but even for the most primitive property: Width, it often fails and is not able to click-to-find where the style is coming from

> Also styles are semantics like:

That's another myth. You style could just be. ReactComponentModel.ReactComponentSubmodel.hkjgsrtio.VeryImportantToIncludeHash.List.BipBop.Sub

What does that inspire in you when you read it?

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#274

Post by abustamam »

yoz-y wrote: post #203
uhoh-itsmaciek wrote: post #58

In text boxes in some applications, enter submits the entered text, and ctrl-enter forces a newline (not at my computer, but I think Slack does this). In others, it's the other way around (pretty sure GitHub does this for comments). I don't know how we got here and I don't know how to fix it, but "bring back idiomatic design" doesn't help when we don't have enough idioms. I'm not even sure if those two behaviors are…

Today I’m thoroughly confident that if I sit in front of an AI chatbot/TUI/whatever. I will invariably fail at knowing which key combo sends the input and which enters a new line. It’s maddening. I don’t understand why we ever let plain Enter send a prompt out.

Yeah this is insane. Maybe most users of chat bots are just sending one line prompts but I find that hard to believe users of Claude code are doing that more often than sending multi-line prompts.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#275

Post by eviks »

skydhash wrote: post #74
kennywinker wrote: post #28

> You don’t want to have to remember to use CTRL + Shift + C in certain circumstances or right-click → copy in others, that’d be annoying. laughs in linux wouldn’t that be nice.

Terminal UX existed before the CUA guidelines from IBM. People complains about Ctrl + Shift + C behavior when it exists only in one category of application, terminal emulators.

Age doesn't matter, usability and consistency does, so that's a valid complaint towards all those hostile apps that haven't changed the defaults

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#276

Post by gostsamo »

uhoh-itsmaciek wrote: post #58

In text boxes in some applications, enter submits the entered text, and ctrl-enter forces a newline (not at my computer, but I think Slack does this). In others, it's the other way around (pretty sure GitHub does this for comments). I don't know how we got here and I don't know how to fix it, but "bring back idiomatic design" doesn't help when we don't have enough idioms. I'm not even sure if those two behaviors are…

for this reason I use shift+enter. I'm blind and not sure if it starts a new paragraph or is just a paragraph break, but works well enough in my experience.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#277

Post by [deleted] »

sheept wrote: post #200
jmbwell wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

macOS is slightly more consistent among apps that use system controls, but the more custom the app, or the more React Native or Electron it is, the less predictable it is Infuriatingly, some apps try to be smart — only one line, return submits; more than one line, return is a new line, and command-return submits; but command-return on just one line beeps an error. Years of muscle memory are useless, so now I’m reachi…

Using provided UI controls is consistent with how today's apps behave on mobile: - For single-line text fields, pressing enter is an alias for submitting the form. - For multi-line text fields, pressing enter inserts a new line. There is no shortcut for submitting the form. In mobile chat apps, the enter key inserts a new line, so you have to press the non-keyboard submit button to send a message. In mobile browser a…

[deleted]

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#278

Post by glerk »

eviks wrote: post #270
glerk wrote: post #240

One trend that I can’t stand currently is the obsession with keyboard shortcuts everywhere even to the point of overriding browser defaults. Cmd+F focusing on the site’s search input instead of letting me search in the page with the browser’s search functionality (looking at you github and Linear). I generally don’t need any fancy keyboard shortcuts on a website. I have a mouse, I can just click around.

What do you think about search override on some dysfunctional modern forums that can't display more than 3 replies, so if you used the built in browser search you wouldn't be able to find anything in a discussion? But also, Vivaldi is awesome here is allowing you to block overrides for specific shortcuts so you Ctrl F is always yours

> dysfunctional modern forums that can't display more than 3 replies,

I assume that's overzealous virtualization/infinite scroll pagination? I don't have a solution, I think fundamentally we're building a workaround for a workaround and the root cause for the performance issues should be fixed. Somehow, HN is able to show a lot of comments per page and page loads are always O(100ms). I'm wondering what kind of sorcery they're using to achieve this.

But if you have to deal with this in your codebase, my instinct is still not to hijack the native Cmd+F, even if it only searches what's inside your viewport. You can expose some other command for full custom search (Cmd+K seems to be the standard, I think VSCode made that popular).

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#279

Post by skydhash »

lmm wrote: post #272
skydhash wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You also need the converse - find which elements a given style applies to - and there's no way to do that AFAIK. I've never needed to do this, because I pay attention to my DOM structure and from CSS selectors can figure where a style applies. But I've just checked and the search bar for Firefox Inspector supports css selectors. > In my experience the DOM doesn't have semantics, or to the extent that it does, they…

> As an example, the structure of HN's reply page Is made up of table tags, which the CSS people will tell you is wrong/impossible/has different semantics.

> Is made up of table tags, which the CSS people will tell you is wrong/impossible/has different semantics

A table is a grid. Lot of UI toolkits have a grid container, and even CSS added it specifically as a layout engine.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#280

Post by swiftcoder »

uhoh-itsmaciek wrote: post #58

In text boxes in some applications, enter submits the entered text, and ctrl-enter forces a newline (not at my computer, but I think Slack does this). In others, it's the other way around (pretty sure GitHub does this for comments). I don't know how we got here and I don't know how to fix it, but "bring back idiomatic design" doesn't help when we don't have enough idioms. I'm not even sure if those two behaviors are…

> and ctrl-enter forces a newline (not at my computer, but I think Slack does this)

Slack also has the option to invert this in settings. I always have it inverted, so that I can freely type multiline messages, and require the more intentional ctrl-enter to actually send.

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