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I get why you would hide interface elements to use the screen real estate for something else. I have no idea why some interfaces hide elements hide and leave t

I get why you would hide interface elements to use the screen real estate for something else. I have no idea why some interfaces hide elements hide and leave the space they'd taken up unused. IntelliJ does this, for example, with the icons above the project tree. There is this little target disc that moves the selection in the project tree to the file currently open in the active editor tab. You have to know the secret spot on the screen where it is hidden and if you move your mouse pointer to the void there, it magically appears. Why? What is the rationale behind going out of your way to implement something like this?

ryncewynd 1y ago
I agree, I know those buttons are there and how to activate them, but I still occasionally stare blankly at the screen wondering where the buttons are before remembering I need to hover them
autobodie 1y ago
Intellij on Windows also buries the top menus into a hamburger icon and leaves the entire area they occupied empty! Thankfully there is an option to reverse it deep in the settings, but having it be the default is absolutely baffling.
- DidYaWipe 1y ago
  Microsoft pulls the same BS. Look at Edge. Absolute mess. No menu. No title bar. What application am I even using? This stupidity seems to have spread across Windows. No title bars or menus... now you can't tell what application a Window belongs to. And you can't even bring all of an application's windows to the foreground... Microsoft makes you hover of it in the task bar and choose between indiscernible thumbnails, one at a time. WTF? If you have two Explorer windows open to copy stuff, then switch to other apps to work during the copy... you can't give focus back to Explorer and see the two windows again. You have to hover, click on a thumbnail. Now go back and hover, and click on a thumbnail... hopefully not the same one, because of course you can't tell WTF the difference between two lists of files is in a thumbnail. And Word... the Word UI is now a clinic on abject usability failure. They have a menu bar... except WAIT! Microsoft and some users claim that those are TABS... except that it's just a row of words, looking exactly like a menu. So now there's NO menu and no actual tabs... just a row of words. And if you go under the File "menu" (yes, File), there are a bunch of VIEW settings. And in there you can add and remove these so-called "tabs," and when you do remove one, the functionality disappears from the entire application. You're not just customizing the toolbar; you're actually disabling entire swaths of features from the application. It's an absolute shitshow of grotesque incompetence, in a once-great product. No amount of derision for this steaming pile is too much.
  - aniforprez 1y ago
    For your complaints about the taskbar, yes I too find it incredibly annoying that they compress all the application windows into a tiny thumbnail but there is a setting to expand thumbnails to include titles and separate them if there are multiple windows which is what I use. I don't currently have access to my windows machine or I'd help you out with the exact setting but it's there somewhere in the "taskbar settings"
    - DidYaWipe 1y ago
      Thanks very much. But it doesn't sound like that would help. First, I doubt a giant network path would fit in the title of a thumbnail. Second, I want to give focus to the entire application at once. ALL of its windows need to be brought to the foreground at once.
      - aniforprez 1y ago
        Yes there are limits to how long the title will go until it starts getting truncated so it is possible it won't fit a network path. I'm not sure if the behaviour of the taskbar was always to bring every window of an app to the foreground? But yes I don't think that's a thing either.
  - userbinator 1y ago
    No title bars or menus... now you can't tell what application a Window belongs to. I hate when applications stuff other controls (like browser tabs) into the title bar --- leaving you with no place to grab and move the window. The irony is that we had title bars when monitors were only 640x480, yet now that they have multiplied many times in resolution, and become much bigger, UIs are somehow using the excuse of "saving space" to remove title bars and introducing even more useless whitespace.
    - DidYaWipe 1y ago
      Amen. And then there's the idiotic peek-a-boo UI that hides controls until you accidentally roll over them with the cursor... not saving any space at all.
wizardforhire 1y ago
In some apps I don’t know more controls are not hidden, at least have the option to hide them. Looking at you google maps.
nine_k 1y ago
Some people complain about "visual clutter". Too many stimuli in the field of view assault their attention, and ruin their concentration. Such people want everything that's not in the focus of attention be gone, or at least be inconspicuous. Some people are like airliner pilots. They enjoy every indicator to be readily visible, and every control to be easily within reach. They can effortlessly switch their focus. Of course, there is a full range between these extremes. The default IDE configuration has to do a balancing act, trying to appeal to very different tastes. It's inevitably a compromise. Some tools have explicit switches: "no distractions mode", "expert mode", etc, which offer pre-configured levels of detail.
- musicale 1y ago
  This is a good idea. In basic/beginner mode, every control should be readily visible and discoverable.
  - theturtle32 1y ago
    In practice, "beginner mode" just makes inaccessible all controls deemed by the designer to be outside the realm of basic use cases.
- layer8 1y ago
  This is why we used to have customizable toolbars, and relevant actions still accessible via context menu and/or main menu, where the respective keyboard shortcuts were also listed. No need to compromise. Just make it customizable using a consistent framework.
  - gmueckl 1y ago
    There is a subtlety here. Having a configurable UI requires that all the buttons and menu entries have a somewhat consistent behavior among themselves. That isn't the case sometimes. For example, if the GUI can have more than one instance of the same view open, toggle buttons for view modes become specific to individual view instances. Putting those into a global toolbar is wrong.
musicale 1y ago
> I get why you would hide interface elements to use the screen real estate for something else. Except that screens on phones, tablets, laptops and desktops are larger than ever. Consider the original Macintosh from 1984 – large, visible controls took up a significant portion of its 9" display (smaller than a 10" iPad, monochrome, and low resolution.) Arguably this was partially due to users being unfamiliar with graphical interfaces, but Apple still chose to sacrifice precious and very limited resources (screen real estate, compute, memory, etc.) on a tiny, drastically underpowered (by modern standards) system in the 1980s for interface clarity, visibility, and discoverability. And once displays got larger the real estate costs became negligible.
9dev 1y ago
> There is this little target disc that moves the selection in the project tree to the file currently open in the active editor tab. Don’t quote me on this, but I vaguely remember there being an option to toggle hiding it, if not in the settings it is in a context menu on the panel. That thing is a massive time saver, and I agree—keeping it hidden means most people never learn it exists.
devnullbrain 1y ago
I really disagree. An IDE, and the browser example given below, are tools I'll spend thousands of hours using in my life. The discoverability is only important for a small percentage of that, while viewing the content is important for all of it. This is exactly when I will have the 'knowledge in the head'.
- xboxnolifes 1y ago
  What part do you disagree with?
burnte 1y ago
> I have no idea why some interfaces hide elements hide and leave the space they'd taken up unused. UI has been taken over by graphic designers and human interaction experts have been pushed out. It happened as we started calling it "user experience" rather than "user interface" because people started to worry about the emotional state of the user, rather than being a tool. It became about being form over function, and now we have to worry about holding it wrong when in reality machines are here to serve humans, not the other way around.

ryncewynd 1y ago

I agree, I know those buttons are there and how to activate them, but I still occasionally stare blankly at the screen wondering where the buttons are before remembering I need to hover them

autobodie 1y ago

Intellij on Windows also buries the top menus into a hamburger icon and leaves the entire area they occupied empty! Thankfully there is an option to reverse it deep in the settings, but having it be the default is absolutely baffling.

DidYaWipe 1y ago
Microsoft pulls the same BS. Look at Edge. Absolute mess. No menu. No title bar. What application am I even using? This stupidity seems to have spread across Windows. No title bars or menus... now you can't tell what application a Window belongs to. And you can't even bring all of an application's windows to the foreground... Microsoft makes you hover of it in the task bar and choose between indiscernible thumbnails, one at a time. WTF? If you have two Explorer windows open to copy stuff, then switch to other apps to work during the copy... you can't give focus back to Explorer and see the two windows again. You have to hover, click on a thumbnail. Now go back and hover, and click on a thumbnail... hopefully not the same one, because of course you can't tell WTF the difference between two lists of files is in a thumbnail. And Word... the Word UI is now a clinic on abject usability failure. They have a menu bar... except WAIT! Microsoft and some users claim that those are TABS... except that it's just a row of words, looking exactly like a menu. So now there's NO menu and no actual tabs... just a row of words. And if you go under the File "menu" (yes, File), there are a bunch of VIEW settings. And in there you can add and remove these so-called "tabs," and when you do remove one, the functionality disappears from the entire application. You're not just customizing the toolbar; you're actually disabling entire swaths of features from the application. It's an absolute shitshow of grotesque incompetence, in a once-great product. No amount of derision for this steaming pile is too much.
- aniforprez 1y ago
  For your complaints about the taskbar, yes I too find it incredibly annoying that they compress all the application windows into a tiny thumbnail but there is a setting to expand thumbnails to include titles and separate them if there are multiple windows which is what I use. I don't currently have access to my windows machine or I'd help you out with the exact setting but it's there somewhere in the "taskbar settings"
  - DidYaWipe 1y ago
    Thanks very much. But it doesn't sound like that would help. First, I doubt a giant network path would fit in the title of a thumbnail. Second, I want to give focus to the entire application at once. ALL of its windows need to be brought to the foreground at once.
    - aniforprez 1y ago
      Yes there are limits to how long the title will go until it starts getting truncated so it is possible it won't fit a network path. I'm not sure if the behaviour of the taskbar was always to bring every window of an app to the foreground? But yes I don't think that's a thing either.
- userbinator 1y ago
  No title bars or menus... now you can't tell what application a Window belongs to. I hate when applications stuff other controls (like browser tabs) into the title bar --- leaving you with no place to grab and move the window. The irony is that we had title bars when monitors were only 640x480, yet now that they have multiplied many times in resolution, and become much bigger, UIs are somehow using the excuse of "saving space" to remove title bars and introducing even more useless whitespace.
  - DidYaWipe 1y ago
    Amen. And then there's the idiotic peek-a-boo UI that hides controls until you accidentally roll over them with the cursor... not saving any space at all.

wizardforhire 1y ago

In some apps I don’t know more controls are not hidden, at least have the option to hide them. Looking at you google maps.

nine_k 1y ago

Some people complain about "visual clutter". Too many stimuli in the field of view assault their attention, and ruin their concentration. Such people want everything that's not in the focus of attention be gone, or at least be inconspicuous. Some people are like airliner pilots. They enjoy every indicator to be readily visible, and every control to be easily within reach. They can effortlessly switch their focus. Of course, there is a full range between these extremes. The default IDE configuration has to do a balancing act, trying to appeal to very different tastes. It's inevitably a compromise. Some tools have explicit switches: "no distractions mode", "expert mode", etc, which offer pre-configured levels of detail.

musicale 1y ago
This is a good idea. In basic/beginner mode, every control should be readily visible and discoverable.
- theturtle32 1y ago
  In practice, "beginner mode" just makes inaccessible all controls deemed by the designer to be outside the realm of basic use cases.
layer8 1y ago
This is why we used to have customizable toolbars, and relevant actions still accessible via context menu and/or main menu, where the respective keyboard shortcuts were also listed. No need to compromise. Just make it customizable using a consistent framework.
- gmueckl 1y ago
  There is a subtlety here. Having a configurable UI requires that all the buttons and menu entries have a somewhat consistent behavior among themselves. That isn't the case sometimes. For example, if the GUI can have more than one instance of the same view open, toggle buttons for view modes become specific to individual view instances. Putting those into a global toolbar is wrong.

musicale 1y ago

> I get why you would hide interface elements to use the screen real estate for something else. Except that screens on phones, tablets, laptops and desktops are larger than ever. Consider the original Macintosh from 1984 – large, visible controls took up a significant portion of its 9" display (smaller than a 10" iPad, monochrome, and low resolution.) Arguably this was partially due to users being unfamiliar with graphical interfaces, but Apple still chose to sacrifice precious and very limited resources (screen real estate, compute, memory, etc.) on a tiny, drastically underpowered (by modern standards) system in the 1980s for interface clarity, visibility, and discoverability. And once displays got larger the real estate costs became negligible.

9dev 1y ago

> There is this little target disc that moves the selection in the project tree to the file currently open in the active editor tab. Don’t quote me on this, but I vaguely remember there being an option to toggle hiding it, if not in the settings it is in a context menu on the panel. That thing is a massive time saver, and I agree—keeping it hidden means most people never learn it exists.

devnullbrain 1y ago

I really disagree. An IDE, and the browser example given below, are tools I'll spend thousands of hours using in my life. The discoverability is only important for a small percentage of that, while viewing the content is important for all of it. This is exactly when I will have the 'knowledge in the head'.

xboxnolifes 1y ago
What part do you disagree with?

burnte 1y ago

> I have no idea why some interfaces hide elements hide and leave the space they'd taken up unused. UI has been taken over by graphic designers and human interaction experts have been pushed out. It happened as we started calling it "user experience" rather than "user interface" because people started to worry about the emotional state of the user, rather than being a tool. It became about being form over function, and now we have to worry about holding it wrong when in reality machines are here to serve humans, not the other way around.