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This is what Microsoft Office has been doing for the past few years. For those unfamiliar, modern Office versions use ribbons instead of menus. Ribbons have a

This is what Microsoft Office has been doing for the past few years. For those unfamiliar, modern Office versions use ribbons instead of menus. Ribbons have a few tabs like home, layout etc. The tabs change depending on what object you're interacting with, so i.e. if you're editing a pivot table in Excel, you get two new tabs for working with pivot tables. That means you only see the options that are actually relevant to you. Each tab has buttons separated into groups. So, there might be a "alignment" group with "left", "center", "right" and "justify" inside. Most buttons have detailed descriptions of what they do and multi-layered, visible keyboard shortcuts that activate them quickly. Some even have an additional drop down for more options, so i.e. the "view" button in Access might switch you between the two most common views when clicked, but you can expand it and select a different view if need be. The latest office versions also have a search field that allows you to find any command, no matter what tab it is in. It has autocomplete, so typing piv usually shows you "pivot table" as one of the first suggestions. I use Excel and Access pretty often, and do some moderately complex things with them, but I almost don't use the traditional ribbon at all. I use shortcuts for the commands I need very often, and search for the rest. If I don't know how something is called, I go through the commands on the relevant tabs and find it eventually. I think this kind of UI scales pretty well. MS Office apps are pretty complicated and packed with features, especially the pro versions, but I think that UI paradigm is pretty scalable and nice for users.

s_gourichon 7y ago
What follows is only partly related to the overall conversation, rather an answer to the ribbon episode. The ribbon in MS Office came along roughly at the same time as 16:9 and 16:10 screens (on laptops in my memories anyway). Already on a 4:3 screen, WYSIWYG editing wastes much space on left and right of the screen, to show paper margins and page limits. And that goddamned ribbon eats up all the top of the screen, making you see only a limited band of what you could see on that very screen. Had no one the idea to make the ribbon a vertical tool bar on the left or right, like in Photoshop/Gimp and a number of other tools? Such a feeling of UI failure at the time. At that moment my computers were already all running Linux anyway, so I've never used it more than a few times on a coworker's machine. Now I no longer use WYSIWYG software. Text editing with the WYSIWYG paradigm feels superficially seducing, until you realize it actually hides the actual document content. How many times has Word shown some items in a bullet list with a different size without any visible reason ? Or in Google docs one bullet horizontally misaligned? Why? No one knows. When editing text, seeing how the final document would look like is not that important. It's more important to know the state of what you're editing. With markdown or asciidoc what you see it what your document actually contains. On top of that, WYSIWIG assumes that there is one final document appearance, which is just not true for a digital document in a digital world that could be rendered countless ways in different styles (unless your workflow targets documents in try-to-mimick-paper-form, like PDF, until that changes).

s_gourichon 7y ago

What follows is only partly related to the overall conversation, rather an answer to the ribbon episode. The ribbon in MS Office came along roughly at the same time as 16:9 and 16:10 screens (on laptops in my memories anyway). Already on a 4:3 screen, WYSIWYG editing wastes much space on left and right of the screen, to show paper margins and page limits. And that goddamned ribbon eats up all the top of the screen, making you see only a limited band of what you could see on that very screen. Had no one the idea to make the ribbon a vertical tool bar on the left or right, like in Photoshop/Gimp and a number of other tools? Such a feeling of UI failure at the time. At that moment my computers were already all running Linux anyway, so I've never used it more than a few times on a coworker's machine. Now I no longer use WYSIWYG software. Text editing with the WYSIWYG paradigm feels superficially seducing, until you realize it actually hides the actual document content. How many times has Word shown some items in a bullet list with a different size without any visible reason ? Or in Google docs one bullet horizontally misaligned? Why? No one knows. When editing text, seeing how the final document would look like is not that important. It's more important to know the state of what you're editing. With markdown or asciidoc what you see it what your document actually contains. On top of that, WYSIWIG assumes that there is one final document appearance, which is just not true for a digital document in a digital world that could be rendered countless ways in different styles (unless your workflow targets documents in try-to-mimick-paper-form, like PDF, until that changes).