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

Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

essays.johnloeber.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 385 posts

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#341

Post by bluGill »

wongarsu wrote: post #308
bluGill wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The telegraph was keybased - only one key so I can't call it a keyboard, but in other ways it is what you are asking about.

Pianos have keys. And some telegraphs were outfitted with piano-like keyboards with one key per letter. Wikipedia has some pictures in the printing telegraph article [1]. So there is arguably a clear lineage from pianos to the modern computer keyboard. Pianos however don't really have a concept of advancing the line or sending a recorded message. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_telegraph

player pianos existed with the concept of advancing are recorded messages. I forgot about them until you metioned them. The music box goes way back

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#342

Post by marxisttemp »

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…

>"bring back idiomatic design" doesn't help when we don't have enough idioms

One must always research and find the dominant or most applicable idioms for whatever they're doing. Are you building a command line tool? For which platform? What other similar tools are you basing its design on? You have to check yourself and see whether your software conforms to the idioms of the platforms, communities, etc that you're targeting.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#343

Post by fireflash38 »

iambateman wrote: post #251
layer8 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decades ago, Return and Enter were two different keys for that reason: Return to insert a line break, Enter to submit your input. Given the reduction to a single key, the traditional GUI rule is that Enter in a multiline/multi-paragraph input doesn’t submit like it does in other contexts, but inserts a line break (or paragraph break), while Ctrl+Enter submits. Chat apps, where single-paragraph content is the typical…

Microsoft teams: not as bad as people say, except for this situation. I have accidentally sent so many messages trying to get to a new line.

It's because enter does different things at different times in the exact same text box.

Write a code snippet/block text. Does [enter] insert a newline, exit the block, or send the message?

What about in a bulleted or numbered list?

And my 2 biggest pet peeves with MS Teams:

1. trying to edit the first letter in a `preformat block`. It's not possible. It will either exit the block or go to the second letter.

2. Consistency with bold/italics. Bold a selection of text. Then backspace once. Are you going to write bold or normal? What does ctrl-B do? Anytime you backspace into a bolded section, it will convert your editing back to bold, and you cannot disable bold.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#344

Post by Bjartr »

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.

There's a setting to toggle this behavior

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#345

Post by Bjartr »

hamasho wrote: post #271
physicles wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ctrl-shift-f to apply formatting to literal markdown that's been entered via pasting

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#346

Post by fireflash38 »

jimbokun wrote: post #213
AgentEpsilon wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams does both - normally it’s Enter to submit and Shift+Enter for a new line, but when you open the formatting tools it switches. They at least do have a message indicating which key combo inputs a new line, but it still gets me on occasion.

I have a very mild jolt of anxiety every time I want to enter a new line in Teams or Slack, wondering if it will send a half completed message I will need to edit after the recipient has seen the half completed message, or it will enter a new line like I want it to. The behavior also changes if you start editing a numbered or unordered list. Maybe that enters the "formatting tools" mode you mention?

Shift enter should always put in a new line. Good luck exiting a block though with it.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#347

Post by donatj »

The examples chosen are particularly interesting to me.

In particular Microsoft Word 2000 was panned at the time for not following native conventions. Its inputs, buttons, and File/Edit menus actually do not match the underlying OS.

Do developers who came from Photoshop or Fireworks days actually like Figma? Maybe it's just down to how our designers are using it but I find pawing around a giant 2 dimensional document awkward as hell versus just opening a well named PSD in a folder.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#348

Post by Stratoscope »

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…

Enter-to-send is horrible.

ChatGPT does it.

Claude does it.

Nextdoor does it.

And none of those give you the courtesy of being able to turn it off.

Slack does it, but if you dig through the settings you may find the way to switch it.

How on earth did so many "designers" fixate on this idea that we must want to share our thought immediately instead of allowing a calmer interaction?

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#349

Post by p-t »

stephbook wrote: post #83
8organicbits wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is still a partial solution as the user needs to know that their locale is being used and know how their locale is configured to understand the format. This is most problematic on shared computers or kiosks, especially when traveling.

I don't even know my locale. Is is the device display language, the keyboard input language, my geo location, my browser language, my legal location, my browser-preferred website language, the language I set last time, the language of the domain (looking at amazon.co.uk), the language that was auto-selected last time for me on mobile or... something else entirely?

the only locale i know about is the windows one that's hidden in some menu that i had to set to japan to get some random application to run, and now all of my backslashes look like yen symbols :P ... maybe i won't get mm/dd/yyyy now!

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#350

Post by somat »

bluGill wrote: post #341
wongarsu wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pianos have keys. And some telegraphs were outfitted with piano-like keyboards with one key per letter. Wikipedia has some pictures in the printing telegraph article [1]. So there is arguably a clear lineage from pianos to the modern computer keyboard. Pianos however don't really have a concept of advancing the line or sending a recorded message. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_telegraph

player pianos existed with the concept of advancing are recorded messages. I forgot about them until you metioned them. The music box goes way back

Now I am searching to see if there were models of player pianos intended to punch tape.

I have never really thought about it but a player piano sort of implies it can only play the roll. If pressed I would guess that player piano rolls were cut by hand. I mean, I am sure they had tools to help them and probably fully automatic duplication machines. but did anyone play the piano to get a piano roll? or was it more like transcribing sheet music?

Post reply on HN