8 ms·

I am, admittedly, on the "one app open at a time" end of things, but so much of this article seems like a user complaining about a mess they made for themselves

I am, admittedly, on the "one app open at a time" end of things, but so much of this article seems like a user complaining about a mess they made for themselves. >> I have 37 windows open, with some 75+ tabs >> I have a Desktop scattered with (currently) 132 icons >> Programs need to cut it out with the dreaded “do you want to review the 88 open documents” crap. There is no technology that can solve those problems. Just close your stuff, man.

jdauriemma 5y ago
Touch UIs like what we find in iOS and Android devices disincentivize clutter pretty well. I mean, yeah - close your stuff - but let's acknowledge that designers have actually solved the described problem on non-desktop platforms.
- yoz-y 5y ago
  But they do have the opposite problem. Working on more than two documents at the same time is just not practical there.
tgbugs 5y ago
I have said this elsewhere, but the fact that so browsers have cashed in on tabs and that tabs are opaque to window managers means that you literally cannot search through your tabs to find one that is already open with the title or content that you want. This is something that technology can trivially and efficiently solve, yet it does not. I wrote my own bash summon/banish script to pull existing windows whose titles match a pattern and send them away. It is better at dealing with 20+ browser windows and 500+ tabs than anything that the UI teams at billion dollar companies seem to have come up with in literally my entire lifetime. This tells me that whatever the UI teams are doing it is a joke, because I have no idea what I am doing and it is working better. I still can't summon windows based on a search of their contents, but I'm sure I can solve that for at least some Emacs buffers. The thing that is stupid is that opening a new window and typing in a url is usually faster than finding the already open version of that same window (which has the old state). Browsers can sort of do this with tabs, but why the heck isn't there a single box that will take you to the information that you were already viewing locally? The user interaction workflows for managing large amounts of information are fundamentally broken. The UX for funnelling users into parting with their dollars and data are flawless, but somehow it is impossible to take me to the window I already had opened on the subject faster than it is for me to open it again from scratch? That is a sad, sad commentary on the dystopian nightmare that we are trapped in.
- samename 5y ago
  Firefox lets you go to a tab that’s already open by entering the title or url.
  - Vinnl 5y ago
    You can also search for tabs if you type a % in the address bar or via a menu entry: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-firefo...
- quirkot 5y ago
  I say this with all the love and compassion in my heart: have you tried bookmarks? Not trying to be snide, but having that many tabs open and expecting to ever come back to the same one twice is 100% incomprehensible to me. But, I freely admit, I start trying to pare down when my tabs get narrower than the default width. I've gathered that I'm an anomaly
  - tgbugs 5y ago
    I hear you. I do use bookmarks, and sometimes they work better than a google search, but they are a solution to a different problem (a problem for which sometimes I wonder whether it doesn't make sense to store the raw html of every page I ever visit and stick it in a full text search index ... org capture maybe?), and they are siloed inside their specific apps or websites. I got burned by using reddit's save functionality without realizing that you can only ever see the last 2k saved pages and now I bookmark things locally so at least sort of unified there. The issue that I'm thinking about here is finding active UI elements that already contain what I am looking for. I have been able to do this to a certain extent in Emacs by writing commands to go to a specific buffer that is already open, except that even that doesn't quite for a variety of reasons including the fact that sometimes you want some exact state and sometimes you want a clean slate and in Emacs in particular doing that can completely mangle buffer ordering. At some point I will get fed up with the current state of things and fix whatever brain dead heuristic destroys the buffer ordering but for now I find workarounds. Essentially the issue is that yes, it would be great to be able to put a pin in the high dimensional state space that is a computer + network and just ... go back to that point, but even ignoring the engineering challenges my experience is that the dominate UI paradigms haven't really even considered the issue (though the research community surely has).
yoz-y 5y ago
Text editors like sublime have been auto saving unsaved files along with dirty flags to temp files for a long time. And sublime for example does not pester with dialogs on close (or at least it didn’t when I was using it) Most editors I use at least have recovery temp files. The step from recovery files to not asking annoying questions is easy.
paraknight 5y ago
Easier said than done unfortunately. One thing that has helped me with tabs a lot is a browser extension that always opens links in the same tab. This makes it so that I need to be explicit if I want to open something in a new tab, and I end up with way fewer tabs to clean up
whobar 5y ago
The author seems to wear his extreme disorganization as a badge of honor. Also from the article: > having 500 tabs open in mobile Safari, which I always do, doesn’t hurt my system performance at all because the tabs are freeze-dried when I’m not using them. When you have so many open tabs, there's no difference between a "freeze dried" tab, and just an entry in your browser's history. If your system performance on desktop is hurt by having 37 windows open, the solution is to just close all these windows. I guarantee you're not going to miss them.
- euroderf 5y ago
  Well of course there's a difference between a "freeze dried" tab and an entry in the browser's history. The latter is just one line in an undifferentiated m(a|e)ss. The former is right in front of your face, one click away, maybe with an icon in view.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    No. If you have 500 tabs open in any program, chances are the one you're interested in is not in view right in front of you just a single click away. There's, at a guess, a 95 percent chance[1] you'll have to scroll around and look for it. And if you're going to have to do that anyway, you can just as well do it in the browser history as among open tabs. ___ 1: It's probably not exactly the same in Safari / iOS, but gotta be the same ballpark: In Firefox / Android I can see fewer than ten tabs at a time. (Hm, that number must have shrunk in a recent update.)
TeMPOraL 5y ago
> There is no technology that can solve those problems. Sure there is. It's just not implemented in most software - including, in particular, web browsers. I currently have 192 buffers opened in the Emacs session on my desktop. 143 on my work machine. That's quite low - both sessions have less than a month of uptime, and I was on ~10 days of leave during that period. I can easily run to 300+ buffers in a few days of work. I've never complained about too many buffers being opened. The trick that makes it works is the tooling around management of open buffers. I only ever see one or two, maybe four, at any given time. There's no tab bar. Switching is done with incremental search - I start typing a substring of a buffer's name, and in 3-5 keystrokes narrow the list to the one buffer I want. The list of candidates starts in most-recent-first order. I could enable fuzzy matching, or matching by both name and type, but I personally don't need it, I have a good memory for buffer/tab/file names. If and when I need to manage buffers in bulk, I fire up the ibuffer interface (which I do by holding CTRL a bit longer, to turn `C-x b` to `C-x C-b`). There I get a table of all buffers, with columns showing the buffer name, size, modification status, mode (i.e. "buffer type" - associated application for handling it), and filename or process bound to the buffer. With a few keypresses, I can sort and filter the list by any of these properties (and a bunch of others). Filters can be incrementally combined. I can mark entries on the list (whether manually, or by a filter), and perform bulk operations on them. And in case you think this is hardcore techie interface - it isn't. It's essentially a streamlined, keyboard-oriented version of what Windows Explorer in "Details" view gives you for your files. I think even casual, non-tech-savvy users are pretty familiar with this view. I'm pretty sure the entire problem of "too many tabs" would go away if the browser did these three things: get rid of the tab bar, provide a decent switcher UI that, beyond the mouse, supports incremental search from keyboard, and provide a table view for managing the tabs.
bigpeopleareold 5y ago
I thought the same thing. If having all this stuff open is a useful thing, then the desktop paradigm is definitely not a problem. If having all this stuff open is a distraction, the desktop paradigm is still not the problem. In one way, it sounds like transient information-hoarding, something few would really desire on a real desktop.

jdauriemma 5y ago

Touch UIs like what we find in iOS and Android devices disincentivize clutter pretty well. I mean, yeah - close your stuff - but let's acknowledge that designers have actually solved the described problem on non-desktop platforms.

yoz-y 5y ago
But they do have the opposite problem. Working on more than two documents at the same time is just not practical there.

tgbugs 5y ago

I have said this elsewhere, but the fact that so browsers have cashed in on tabs and that tabs are opaque to window managers means that you literally cannot search through your tabs to find one that is already open with the title or content that you want. This is something that technology can trivially and efficiently solve, yet it does not. I wrote my own bash summon/banish script to pull existing windows whose titles match a pattern and send them away. It is better at dealing with 20+ browser windows and 500+ tabs than anything that the UI teams at billion dollar companies seem to have come up with in literally my entire lifetime. This tells me that whatever the UI teams are doing it is a joke, because I have no idea what I am doing and it is working better. I still can't summon windows based on a search of their contents, but I'm sure I can solve that for at least some Emacs buffers. The thing that is stupid is that opening a new window and typing in a url is usually faster than finding the already open version of that same window (which has the old state). Browsers can sort of do this with tabs, but why the heck isn't there a single box that will take you to the information that you were already viewing locally? The user interaction workflows for managing large amounts of information are fundamentally broken. The UX for funnelling users into parting with their dollars and data are flawless, but somehow it is impossible to take me to the window I already had opened on the subject faster than it is for me to open it again from scratch? That is a sad, sad commentary on the dystopian nightmare that we are trapped in.

samename 5y ago
Firefox lets you go to a tab that’s already open by entering the title or url.
- Vinnl 5y ago
  You can also search for tabs if you type a % in the address bar or via a menu entry: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-firefo...
quirkot 5y ago
I say this with all the love and compassion in my heart: have you tried bookmarks? Not trying to be snide, but having that many tabs open and expecting to ever come back to the same one twice is 100% incomprehensible to me. But, I freely admit, I start trying to pare down when my tabs get narrower than the default width. I've gathered that I'm an anomaly
- tgbugs 5y ago
  I hear you. I do use bookmarks, and sometimes they work better than a google search, but they are a solution to a different problem (a problem for which sometimes I wonder whether it doesn't make sense to store the raw html of every page I ever visit and stick it in a full text search index ... org capture maybe?), and they are siloed inside their specific apps or websites. I got burned by using reddit's save functionality without realizing that you can only ever see the last 2k saved pages and now I bookmark things locally so at least sort of unified there. The issue that I'm thinking about here is finding active UI elements that already contain what I am looking for. I have been able to do this to a certain extent in Emacs by writing commands to go to a specific buffer that is already open, except that even that doesn't quite for a variety of reasons including the fact that sometimes you want some exact state and sometimes you want a clean slate and in Emacs in particular doing that can completely mangle buffer ordering. At some point I will get fed up with the current state of things and fix whatever brain dead heuristic destroys the buffer ordering but for now I find workarounds. Essentially the issue is that yes, it would be great to be able to put a pin in the high dimensional state space that is a computer + network and just ... go back to that point, but even ignoring the engineering challenges my experience is that the dominate UI paradigms haven't really even considered the issue (though the research community surely has).

yoz-y 5y ago

Text editors like sublime have been auto saving unsaved files along with dirty flags to temp files for a long time. And sublime for example does not pester with dialogs on close (or at least it didn’t when I was using it) Most editors I use at least have recovery temp files. The step from recovery files to not asking annoying questions is easy.

paraknight 5y ago

Easier said than done unfortunately. One thing that has helped me with tabs a lot is a browser extension that always opens links in the same tab. This makes it so that I need to be explicit if I want to open something in a new tab, and I end up with way fewer tabs to clean up

whobar 5y ago

The author seems to wear his extreme disorganization as a badge of honor. Also from the article: > having 500 tabs open in mobile Safari, which I always do, doesn’t hurt my system performance at all because the tabs are freeze-dried when I’m not using them. When you have so many open tabs, there's no difference between a "freeze dried" tab, and just an entry in your browser's history. If your system performance on desktop is hurt by having 37 windows open, the solution is to just close all these windows. I guarantee you're not going to miss them.

euroderf 5y ago
Well of course there's a difference between a "freeze dried" tab and an entry in the browser's history. The latter is just one line in an undifferentiated m(a|e)ss. The former is right in front of your face, one click away, maybe with an icon in view.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  No. If you have 500 tabs open in any program, chances are the one you're interested in is not in view right in front of you just a single click away. There's, at a guess, a 95 percent chance[1] you'll have to scroll around and look for it. And if you're going to have to do that anyway, you can just as well do it in the browser history as among open tabs. ___ 1: It's probably not exactly the same in Safari / iOS, but gotta be the same ballpark: In Firefox / Android I can see fewer than ten tabs at a time. (Hm, that number must have shrunk in a recent update.)

TeMPOraL 5y ago

> There is no technology that can solve those problems. Sure there is. It's just not implemented in most software - including, in particular, web browsers. I currently have 192 buffers opened in the Emacs session on my desktop. 143 on my work machine. That's quite low - both sessions have less than a month of uptime, and I was on ~10 days of leave during that period. I can easily run to 300+ buffers in a few days of work. I've never complained about too many buffers being opened. The trick that makes it works is the tooling around management of open buffers. I only ever see one or two, maybe four, at any given time. There's no tab bar. Switching is done with incremental search - I start typing a substring of a buffer's name, and in 3-5 keystrokes narrow the list to the one buffer I want. The list of candidates starts in most-recent-first order. I could enable fuzzy matching, or matching by both name and type, but I personally don't need it, I have a good memory for buffer/tab/file names. If and when I need to manage buffers in bulk, I fire up the ibuffer interface (which I do by holding CTRL a bit longer, to turn `C-x b` to `C-x C-b`). There I get a table of all buffers, with columns showing the buffer name, size, modification status, mode (i.e. "buffer type" - associated application for handling it), and filename or process bound to the buffer. With a few keypresses, I can sort and filter the list by any of these properties (and a bunch of others). Filters can be incrementally combined. I can mark entries on the list (whether manually, or by a filter), and perform bulk operations on them. And in case you think this is hardcore techie interface - it isn't. It's essentially a streamlined, keyboard-oriented version of what Windows Explorer in "Details" view gives you for your files. I think even casual, non-tech-savvy users are pretty familiar with this view. I'm pretty sure the entire problem of "too many tabs" would go away if the browser did these three things: get rid of the tab bar, provide a decent switcher UI that, beyond the mouse, supports incremental search from keyboard, and provide a table view for managing the tabs.

bigpeopleareold 5y ago

I thought the same thing. If having all this stuff open is a useful thing, then the desktop paradigm is definitely not a problem. If having all this stuff open is a distraction, the desktop paradigm is still not the problem. In one way, it sounds like transient information-hoarding, something few would really desire on a real desktop.