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Comment by cptskippy | Hacker News Reader

I'm primarily on Windows and that first feature annoys the heck out of me. I would rather scrolling stop or continue, but the snap-back when the mouse leaves a zone is irritating.

I think the second is more of an optimization because when you click on the address bar you're most likely either copying or overwriting the URL. It's much less common to modify it.

If you want a supremely annoying address bar, you should check out Windows File Explorer from Vista/7 onward. Each component of the URI is a drop down menu item and only by clicking on whitespace to the far right can you get to the actual URI.

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The file explorer address bar was one of the best features that were introduced in Vista IMO.

If you're in folder "C:\foo\bar\baz\boz\" and want to go to "C:\foo\" it's just one mouse click. Or if you want to go to "C:\foo\bor" that's just two mouse clicks. Much faster than clicking "back" or "up" multiple times.

To add to this, I believe in Windows 10 (possibly 8?) you can actually move files to a grandparent folder by dragging it to the associated button in the breadcrumb bar.

Going from memory since I couldn't reproduce this behavior in 7. Could also be wrong about 10; someone else should try it and confirm.

I just tested in Windows 10, and you're right, you can drag files to any of the parent directories in the address bar.

Sweet.

Yeah, I remember doing it once and thinking it was extremely helpful at the time, but I only remember doing it once so far.

Got used to do this in Gnome, got frustrated when I found "breadcrumbs" in win7 can't do the same...

Well, to be fair if you have the much older tree view enabled on the left side of the explorer, it's only one click to go to C:\foo\bor.

I agree with parent, the adress bar should be the adress bar. Also better for sans-mouse-use. Just F6 and end, ctrl+shift+left arrow until you get to before "bar" and then backspace, enter.

Sure, it's more input but it's still way faster than reaching for your mouse.

(old guy here) I'll never understand why the left-pane tree view isn't the default. Not having it follow the current directory makes it a waste of screen real estate.

>if you have the much older tree view enabled on the left side of the explorer, it's only one click to go to C:\foo\bor

No, it's unpredictable amount of clicks, drags and scrolls to unpredictable places, if C:\foo\bor is not immediately visible in the tree view. And worse, if there is "bor" in every one of 100 "foos" you have on C:.

> If you want a supremely annoying address bar, you should check out Windows File Explorer from Vista/7 onward. Each component of the URI is a drop down menu item and only by clicking on whitespace to the far right can you get to the actual URI.

Actually, I’m one of the people who like that so much, I enabled it even in KDE Dolphin.

EDIT: Due to submission restrictions, I can’t answer right now – I’ll have to wait about an hour before I can answer comments, sorry.

How do you use it? I understand how it works but I see no advantage to it over the tree view. I always enable the "expand to location" option so that my tree view is exactly where I am.

To me that address bar abomination is just an obfuscation of otherwise useful information with large clickable regions of functionality I don't want.

I think you are in the minority here. For most people, navigating from one folder to another is not "functionality I don't want" in a desktop folder browser, but is the main thing you want to do. I'd much rather have UI that lets me navigate efficiently than that makes it efficient to copy-and-paste arbitrary substrings within a folder path. I do the former almost every time I use the file browser and the latter basically never.

My main computer is a Mac and I very much wish its "Finder" had navigation tools as nice as the "breadcrumb bar" you are describing in Windows.

>My main computer is a Mac and I very much wish its "Finder" had navigation tools as nice as the "breadcrumb bar" you are describing in Windows.

It's not completely the same as on Windows, but:

- Shift-Apple-G lets you enter a directory path to open (including bash-like completion with tab).

- Option-Apple-P shows/hides the "path bar" at the lower edge of a window where the hierarchy of the current folder is displayed (including a spartan context menu).

On Windows I mainly use the explorer address bar to go to those hidden folders like ProgramData.

On OS X, I think you can just right-click the window name and select the parent folder you want to go up to.

I think there is also a "show breadcrumbs" option in the preferences for Finder, which may or may not give more of the functionality you want.

Thanks for the right-click on title tip... doesn't seem to have a show breadcrumbs option that I can find... still in yosimite on my work laptop though.

The menu option actually calls it "Path Bar", not "Breadcrumb Bar".

> How do you use it? I understand how it works but I see no advantage to it over the tree view. I always enable the "expand to location" option so that my tree view is exactly where I am.

Well, the tree view in dolphin is small, and mostly hidden by the bookmark menu.

So I have to resort to using the breadcrumbs as a poor (wo-)mans tree view.

>If you want a supremely annoying address bar, you should check out Windows File Explorer from Vista/7 onward. Each component of the URI is a drop down menu item and only by clicking on whitespace to the far right can you get to the actual URI.

You can also right click the bar to edit or copy the URI...

I have to use Windows 7 periodically, and it annoys the heck out of me too, given the feature applies to every application on that platform.

It's the fact it's inconsistent on my platform (KDE on Debian GNU/Linux) exacerbates the annoyance. I should not have to consider which application I'm in, in order to preempt the way the scrollbar / mouse will work.

With the second - I appreciate that for many people, for much of the time, you're wanting to type something else into the address bar. However, on MS Windows you have to type ctrl-c / ctrl-v to copy / paste. On real operating systems <tm> you just have to select the region -- so having a whole line selected for you when you click near it is unwanted.

But ultimately it's the inconsistency. I need to consider if I'm clicking in the address bar, or another text box, in order to predict what's about to be selected.

And, yes, the Win7 explorer bar has moved me to tears also. I can highly recommend the breadcrumbkiller [1] - even if you don't install it, the rant on that guy's page is well worth reading.

[1] http://twigstechtips.blogspot.com.au/2010/02/win7-remove-win...

I believe the name of the feature is called "breadcrumbs" and i also dont like it very much, as one poster stated it is nice to go up several levels without making many clicks but i prefer to see the entire URI and be able to modify it as oppose to breadcrumb "directory buttons"

If you click to the right of everything, then it turns into a textbox and you can modify it at will.

Which doesn't help in the most common case (for me): editing down a URL that's way too long on sites that love to jam absolutely everything they can think of into a query string, extending the URL many screen widths out to the right.

CTRL+L is generally your friend.

Pressing CTRL+L selects the entire location bar. This is not what I want.

The second is really annoying on Linux because selecting something in X clears the previous selection.

Nope, they actually thought about that. When you click on the url box the selection isn't replaced. So you can totally select an URL elsewhere, click on URL bar, press backspace to clear the bar, and middle-click-paste the selection.

On the other hand selecting the text in the URL bar in any other way (with mouse drag, triple click, or keyboard) will update the selection.

This does mean that copying the whole URL is a pain - click to highlight the whole thing, then click a bunch more times until the whole thing is highlighted again.

(Unless I'm mistaken, the right-click copy uses a different clipboard, so you can't use that.)

Yeah I can see how that would be annoying. I'm so rarely in X that I don't always appreciate some of the features it offers. Scrolling the window under the cursor though is one I always hope will find it's way into Windows.

Windows 10 actually has that on by default now, called "Scroll Inactive Windows."

> I would rather scrolling stop or continue, but the snap-back when the mouse leaves a zone is irritating.

I liked it (back when it existed on Mac OS X): By moving the mouse horizontally to the vertical scroll bar I could instantly return to where I started scrolling. Use case: Read something (web page, source code...), scroll around to look for related information, then return back to the exact position I was before.

> Each component of the URI is a drop down menu item and only by clicking on whitespace to the far right can you get to the actual URI.

And you also have the confusing "copy address" / "copy address as text" context menu.

With multiple monitors scroll bars are broken anyway.

I use drag to scroll assigned to my right mouse button (works great in FF, so so in Chrome):

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/grab-and-drag...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scrollbar-anywhere...

I miss this so much outside my browser...

There are programs like DisplayFusion which take care of scrolling in non-focused windows. I highly recommend it, although it is paid after a while. There must be other tools out there that can do it!

jup, i used http://www.premeforwindows.com/ for a while. But i mean the drag anywhere to scroll.

I use the first feature constantly. If I'm reading reddit comments at the bottom of the page, I can scroll to the top and a part of the original post and then snap back to where I was. I think Chrome actually removed this for a day or two and it really annoyed me.

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