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Comment by dboreham | Hacker News Reader

Pro tip: put the toolbar on the left side of the screen rather than the the bottom location.

Do others do this? I've always found the right side to be the better alternative since the bottom and right sides would be the natural "ends" of the screen.

I have the dock on the left of all of my Macs .

First thing I do is pin it to the top right, the way it should be https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/desktop/firstrun/opens...

Ubuntu's Unity had the dock on the side - I believe inspired by the unusual 1024x600 screen on the Eee PC.

Always showing?

I do this - and yes, always showing. Makes for better ergonomics when you can aim your mouse trajectory at exactly where you need to be instead of mousing over, waiting for the dock to appear, and then mousing to the specific icon you want.

I just set my dock animation delay to 0. I rarely click icons in the dock though.

I often drag items to the dock to open them in an application other than the default (only the finder let's you select what app to open a file in without doing that).

I also have an issue where if I've got multiple windows from a single app open in different virtual desktops, the only way to get to the other windows from the app is to click the dock icon - it can't be done via keyboard as far as I can tell. (And yes, it's infuriating.)

Not GP, but no, I have the dock on the left, hidden and non-zooming.

Then again my use of the dock is sporadic, mostly for accessing recent downloads.

Yes, always showing, due to decades of Microsoft bugs with their toolbar which would inevitably get stuck showing but masking the underlying window or stuck hidden.

Get rid of the toolbar, windoze and osx. i3 window manager is a good option -- keyboard is main interface in laptop.

"Annoyed by having toolbar take up vertical space. Easy, just change OS."

Hide the toolbar. Trivial on OSX.

That doesn’t work well for toolbars which have text labels ( like bookmarks or a windows style taskbar).

Not sure what you're thinking of but check out the Tree Style Tabs browse plugin to see what they mean. Tabs with text work perfectly.

I mean that you need something more than 100px wide. So it cuts into the page space more aggressively. It’s a good use of space but unfortunately most designs do not account for this very well in my experience.

Windows 95-style taskbar, sure, but since Vista switched to the default of grouping icons with rich hover, the Windows taskbar has only gotten better at being on the short axis.

(Though I've been keeping my main taskbar on the right hand side since XP and that was perfectly reasonable then even. These days, I tend to sandwich my Windows taskbars these days with it on the left on the left monitor and on the right on the right monitor.)

It works better for bookmarks, since you can fit more entries in the list before you have to scroll.

Good point. I tend to use folders so on a bar they’d be a menu that would hide and then show. But for things like reading lists where I want something linear and present, the sidebar is nice.

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