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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2902 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 19, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Windows 11 may have my least-favorite feature ever. Try this:

  • Open a file.
  • write some new stuff in it.
  • close the file.
  • reopen it.
  • confirm that the changes were kept.

Did you notice a missing step? I never said to save the changes, so the file was never updated. Instead, the changes were kept in a sort of suspended animation by the editor, and reappeared (in the editor only) when I reopened it.

Conflating "closing the file/discarding changes" with "closing the application window" was never a great UI compromise, so this seems like an improvement. You just need to accept that program state and file state do not need to be correlated.

You just need to accept that program state and file state do not need to be correlated.

Or I could continue to tilt at windmills.

I just have an odd feeling that, when you're using a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get style editor, when you see something you should also get it.

Windows 11 may have my least-favorite feature ever. Try this:

That is not by far the least favorite feature of windows 11

There's actually a whole discussion around that. iOS popularized it, then Apple started including saving edits by default in some of their apps like Preview. They added a "create duplicate" menu item if you want to preserve the original. Designers live on their iPads, so it's been infecting other apps ever since.

The other change is how most web apps do "save edits automatically" now. Previously the standard was to present the user an empty form, let them fill in values, then create when they hit save.

Apple changed it to create an item (the item is actually created), then edit the item where your edits are saved by default. The big downside to this is that things get messy when a field has to be unique or it's expensive to update.

I've had many nightmare codebases where the designer wanted Apple style, the backend people wanted traditional style, and neither were willing to sit down and discus the differences.

Just today, I installed Manjaro Linux on a spare laptop I had handy. I'm loving it so far. I think soon I'm going away from Windows for good.

  1. it does not seem windows 11 specific, it looks program specific
  2. there should be an option to reload from file or just do ctrl-z
  3. I like such feature and several programs that I use on Linux have it

I like such feature and several programs that I use on Linux have it

Such as the famously-modern program vim.

The vim feature is there as more of a crash recovery feature. It asks you if you want to recover your edits when you start. The new style is a little different.

If you want to complain some weird random app, you should complain about that app (at the very least name it!), not Windows 11 when Windows itself has nothing to do with your app.

And no, even Windows 11 notepad doesn't do that. If you close a file without saving and open it again, the original contents remain. It's only when you go to the original restored tab in Notepad that the changes remain - clearly marked as unsaved!

It was Notepad. I'm comfortable with the synecdoche, but could have been clearer.

clearly marked as unsaved!

Are we using the same program? I can't imagine anyone calling a small grey dot "clearly marked", never mind "clearly marked as...".

For reference, the only visual difference between a saved file and an unsaved one is that the "close tab" location goes from [ ]/[X] to [•]/[X]. If your mouse is hovering over the X then there's no difference.

Notepad++ does this, but it makes it clear when you reopen the application that these are unsaved changes you are viewing. You can press CTRL-R to reload from the file and throw away your changes, among other pathways.

It'd be pretty thrown off if one day Notepad started doing that too without the robust UI changes Notepad++ has around the feature.

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