7 ms·
These are great, but with some of them I cannot help but wonder why MSFT would choose not to include them in the OS by default. They seem fairly unobtrusive and
by bschne 4y ago
These are great, but with some of them I cannot help but wonder why MSFT would choose not to include them in the OS by default. They seem fairly unobtrusive and like they wouldn't add too much complexity to the product in return for what you get in terms of better usability and/or additional functionality.
Of course you could argue that you always have to be very careful not to overload and bloat your software product, especially if it's an OS — but windows contains two different consoles, about three versions of the system preferences management, ..., it just doesn't seem like MSFT to be that picky about what they'll put into their product.
- NoahKAndrews 4y agoIn a small amount of fairness, Windows only comes with one console. On Windows 10, you have to install Windows Terminal separately, and on Windows 11, Windows Terminal is the only one.
- nrabulinski 4y agoWindows 10 comes with cmd.exe and power shell, both include their own terminal emulators. Windows 11 comes with both and with windows terminal on top of it.
- legalcorrection 4y agoNo, that's not right. conhost.exe is the old terminal emulator and Windows Terminal is the new one. cmd.exe and powershell are analogous to bash/zsh/etc. and can run inside either conhost.exe or Windows Terminal.
- mixmastamyk 4y agoConhost is not really a terminal emulator, except in the sense that it’s a square box to type into. It is not an emulator. Design, Architecture, implementation all completely different and gimped.
- legalcorrection 4y agoYes good point. One of the things that annoys me most about HNers is that they think Unix is the one true OS paradigm and measure all other designs by how similar they are. And here I am doing it myself.
- hulitu 4y agoOur OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name. Thy programs run, thy syscalls done, in kernel as it is in user! Give us this day our daily cycles, And forgive us our GOTO's As we forgive them that also use BASIC. Lead us not into FORTRAN, But deliver us from COBOL. For thine is the for loop, the while and the switch For ever and ever, Amen.
- vetinari 4y agocmd.exe and powershell do not include "terminal emulators". Pre-Windows Terminal, they (and every other console app) use conhost.exe, that comes with the system. Windows Terminal comes with openconsole.exe, that any app can use instead. In Windows 11, it can be set up as the default one.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- xen2xen1 4y agoSupport costs. They don't help enough people to justify the problems that would pop up. The people who download Power Toys can probably take care of themselves.
- Shadonototra 4y agosupport costs for a trillion dollar company, sure if they can't do it, i know lot of people who would do it for the same salary they are getting over there at MSFT lazy culture, how long it took them to add tabs to explorer? hmm
- baq 4y agogiven the approx. millions of configurations they already support, adding more is always a cost-benefit analysis. personally if I was a developer of this I wouldn't want it anywhere near the gold release... it'd take all the fun away and you'd have to give up development to some team you haven't heard about in the next cost optimization cycle (Real Soon Now(TM))
- xen2xen1 4y agoYup, everything you add is something that people will call about, guaranteed. And these are more complex than most things. You imagine if everyone could remap their keys? You make it free and easy to download and do Github "support".
- RajT88 4y agoTrillion dollar companies don't like funding their support departments any more than < million dollar companies do.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y agoWhen you have a product that is marketed towards the masses, support costs can be astronomical. A not-too-small number of calls won't even be for your product. My uncle works tech support for a major ISP. He gets at least a couple calls a day from people thinking they need to call him because their Windows PC won't turn on or some other non-Internet related issue. And then there's the sheer number of trivial calls. Do you know how many people call Amazon because they forgot their password, rather than just using the password reset function? Or how many people call their bank to find their balance rather than checking the website? And of course, these people demand to talk to a human.
- fassssst 4y agoFancy Zones was an inspiration for Windows 11’s Snap Layout feature, which is a bit simplified but provides many of the same benefits.
- V-2 4y agoIt is essentially the same thing, with FancyZones only adding the ability to enhance default presets with custom layouts - am I wrong?
- judge2020 4y agoFancyZones are quite more powerful, eg. you can hold shift while dragging a window to show your layound and snap that window to the layout. With 11 it's pretty much exclusively limited to "either drag a window against the side of the screen for zone hints, or hover the maximize button".
- V-2 4y agoI think that on "bare" Win 11 you press Win+Z, and you see a selection of a few possible layouts that you can click and choose
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- a-dub 4y agobigger question in my mind: how did they come to be? are they features that were planned but then abandoned? do developers at microsoft have the autonomy to build features they personally find interesting while on the clock? do they come from hackathon like events? do they now all come through a dedicated team?
- ripley12 4y agoPowerToys is able to grow, experiment and evolve much more quickly as a standalone application because shipping something inside Windows is hard. The OS has a very long support and compatibility guarantee that makes it extremely difficult to iterate and ship features quickly. The .NET team is pretty open about how being coupled to Windows for a long time held .NET back. Also, my understanding is that PowerToys is sort of an incubator; successful experiments may eventually make it into Windows itself.