Windows Explorer Through the Years • Hacker News Board

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#91

Post by ubercow13 » Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 12:41 PM UTC

RMPR wrote: post #88

ubercow13 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find Dolphin much better than Nautilus, it is probably the only traditional graphical file manager I have used that is better than Explorer. If you have a Gnome desktop set up it can be fiddly to integrate a KDE application with it nicely, but in my opinion it is worth it for Dolphin alone, one of the best engineered of the normal desktop Linux applications. If you want to stick with GTK, Nemo is a fork of Nautilus…

>It's also a little bit more performant than Nautilus recently too I think, but both are still slow compared to eg. Thunar or Dolphin. Laughing in Midnight commander

Dolphin is approximately as fast as mc for me at listing large directories, both the same speed as 'ls'. Which is quite impressive when you consider how much more metadata it will show than mc and that it has a full graphical widget displaying them with thumbnail previews. AFAIK mc can't even show mimetypes in the file list, but Dolphin will load them asynchronously after listing the directory as you scroll.

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#92

Post by magnio » Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 12:41 PM UTC

quyleanh wrote: post #29

And the endless question is: When we have fluent design UI version of Explorer?

There's a UWP version called Files UWP: https://github.com/files-community/files-uwp

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#93

Post by siggen » Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 12:49 PM UTC

Replacing the menu interface with the ribbon interface in Win10 and Office... I am not sure what the thought process was for Microsoft to have done that. Sometimes you already have something solid and it doesn’t need change. I liked being able to navigate the explorer UI with the keyboard with hints provided directly in the UI. For example, Alt+T O opened the tools menu, then the Options dialog box. But now, there’s no menu....

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#94

Post by cosmodisk » Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 12:54 PM UTC

I think the design that made sense stopped with Win XP. The following iterations just make less and less sense and I'm a win user since 3.1.

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#95

Post by icegreentea2 » Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 12:57 PM UTC

siggen wrote: post #93

Replacing the menu interface with the ribbon interface in Win10 and Office... I am not sure what the thought process was for Microsoft to have done that. Sometimes you already have something solid and it doesn’t need change. I liked being able to navigate the explorer UI with the keyboard with hints provided directly in the UI. For example, Alt+T O opened the tools menu, then the Options dialog box. But now, there’s…

I understand the frustration at having changes work against muscle memory, but you can still navigate the UI as you described - it's just that "Options" is bundled under "View" now. alt,v,y,enter or alt,v,y,o will open the options dialog. The hints are now hidden until you hit alt now though =/

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#96

Post by AnonC » Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 1:02 PM UTC

siggen wrote: post #93

Replacing the menu interface with the ribbon interface in Win10 and Office... I am not sure what the thought process was for Microsoft to have done that. Sometimes you already have something solid and it doesn’t need change. I liked being able to navigate the explorer UI with the keyboard with hints provided directly in the UI. For example, Alt+T O opened the tools menu, then the Options dialog box. But now, there’s…

The ribbon came in MS Office 2007 as a result of user studies that showed that menus weren’t effective in showing the users what was possible or what features were available in an application. That’s why this new UI (“Fluent UI”) was designed for better discoverability. [1]

Once you do something new and different, I suppose it’s natural to copy it over everywhere else (like Windows Explorer).

[1]: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX08/UX09

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#97

Post by matsemann » Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 1:04 PM UTC

usrusr wrote: post #75

LandR wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also if you aren't on hte mouse, CTRL+L in the folder jumps the cursor to the address bar.

Thank god they finally copied this behavior from web browsers. I had a machine trapped on a Windows 8 until recently and lack of ctrl+l was infuriating! If you are "one of the 10000" about this today, don't beat yourself up about this, explorer's ctrl+l hasn't been around very long.

I think it used to be F4 or F6 or something for Explorer. I also used to use F6 in firefox, took some time re-learning Ctrl+L when that changed. (Edit: F6 still works, but it cycles elements (one which is the address bar) so ctrl+l is better)

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#98

Post by AnonC » Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 1:06 PM UTC

vbezhenar wrote: post #4

Sorry for offtopic, but I'd like to share a tip I can't imagine living without. You can type cmd in explorer address bar and it'll open cmd in that directory (probably works with any other program in your %PATH%). Also you can type `explorer .` in cmd to open explorer in the current directory.

Windows Explorer has been so slow that I actively avoid using it and use the command prompt instead. Even on an SSD, opening a folder sometimes takes several seconds while Explorer scans that folder with a progress bar on the address bar (and does I-don’t-know-what in the background). I see this happening for downloads and many other folders.

I use Keypirinha, Everything, and other tools to get work done.

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#99

Post by oblio » Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 1:10 PM UTC

AnonC wrote: post #98

vbezhenar wrote: post #4

Sorry for offtopic, but I'd like to share a tip I can't imagine living without. You can type cmd in explorer address bar and it'll open cmd in that directory (probably works with any other program in your %PATH%). Also you can type `explorer .` in cmd to open explorer in the current directory.

Windows Explorer has been so slow that I actively avoid using it and use the command prompt instead. Even on an SSD, opening a folder sometimes takes several seconds while Explorer scans that folder with a progress bar on the address bar (and does I-don’t-know-what in the background). I see this happening for downloads and many other folders. I use Keypirinha , Everything , and other tools to get work done.

In many of those cases it's shell extensions installed by other apps that make Explorer slow. I forgot how you can check that, but you can.

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#100

Post by cheerlessbog » Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 1:10 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #99

AnonC wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows Explorer has been so slow that I actively avoid using it and use the command prompt instead. Even on an SSD, opening a folder sometimes takes several seconds while Explorer scans that folder with a progress bar on the address bar (and does I-don’t-know-what in the background). I see this happening for downloads and many other folders. I use Keypirinha , Everything , and other tools to get work done.

In many of those cases it's shell extensions installed by other apps that make Explorer slow. I forgot how you can check that, but you can.

“autoruns” from sysinternals