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Comment by MH15 | Hacker News Reader

This is an amazing design exercise, but the thing about Win10 that really pushes my buttons is the Control Panel/Settings conundrum. Each version it seems another feature gets added into the real settings app but still needing to open an old-themed dialog to change mouse settings of all things seems odd. It's not like mouse settings are an obscure feature. I'm not sure why a higher emphasis on cohesiveness isn't noted.

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What you might be missing is some complex technical reason why the mouse control panel cannot be easily migrated. For example, a lot of drivers integrate their own tabs into the mouse control panel for features.

The slow migration from control panel to settings is actually, in my opinion, one of the better ways Microsoft has done software development. We aren't waiting 5 years for them to migrate 20 years of settings and we aren't stuck with a limited version 1.0 product without sufficient features.

I don't get people's enthusiasm for the settings app, I find control panel the faster way of achieving almost everything. Settings is slow and sometimes you circuitously end up where control panel world have sent you directly, e.g. when you want to change network adapter settings.

My biggest gripe about the new settings app is not being able to have more than one window open at the same time.

It’s a classic case of ease of use without experience vs speed with experience. Unfortunately, the former is the one that seems to win out with the masses.

Maybe there’s some sort of hybrid approach with keybindings for the power users and the blocky menu for more casual access.

The lack of keyboard shortcuts and tabbing means any setting I have to change repeatedly is a bunch of hard-to-automate clicks. (Namely, plugging into a new monitor and rotating it, since the Ctrl+Alt+UpArrow doesn't work any more.)

I think that was an Intel driver shortcut.

Try ctrl + alt + left, or ctrl + alt + right.

Ctrl + alt + up sets it to default rotation so far as I remember.

Text-searching the Settings often hangs on me, too (on more than one machine).

I agree. In addition, to me anyway, the settings app is kind of hideous. It follows some weird design principles and UI colors that don't even match the rest of the Win10 UI (even the new parts)! I would have expected to see something like explorer.exe - kind of a modern version of the older Win7 era UI principles.

In the touch-enabled world of devices Metro was envisioned for, yes, mouse settings should no longer be relevant. Meanwhile, in the real world, Windows phone died, just one colleague I know uses Windows on a tablet, yet Microsoft is still attempting to replace the control panel with an optimized-for-touch-only app.

This is Apple- or Gnome-level pretentiousness: "that use case doesn't fit our brand, let's act like it's not there".

I don’t see them now that I’ve moved to New Orleans but when I was in Seattle I saw a lot of people using Surfaces in cafes and regularly poking at their screens with a finger. I don’t think this was necessarily a dogfood thing either, I was rarely in Redmond.

Windows is still arguably the best OS for doing productive work on the tablet, so I'm personally very happy Microsoft is still developing it in this direction. That said, compared to old Control Panel, the Settings app is a loss in utility.

One of the more annoying pattern in it is hiding stuff that's unavailable. I have a cheap 2-in-1 Windows computer I use as my sidearm, and it tends to lose or gain the tablet mode screen autorotation setting every other Windows Update. Only after I realized what's going on, I stopped feeling gaslighted by the Settings app.

What about notebooks with touch screens?

They are rare compared to every other desktop/laptop computer, they still have touchpads and really why would you smear your screen with your sweaty fingers when you can avoid that?

I was saying the same thing but once you have one it's actually quite nice from time to time.

That is really an indictment of the sorry state of PC trackpads. When I use my partner's MacBook with its pixel-perfect, glass trackpad, I never feel wanting a touchscreen.

Sure, i actually have one (well, kinda, i have a GPD Win which has a touch screen although i still prefer to use the joystick to move the mouse even if it s a bit slower) but optimizing the UI for the rare case doesn't make much sense to me.

The bit-by-bit migration of control panel to settings is iterative if not anything else. Else you'd need to wait years for them to migrate all things.

Still, I don't believe everything is eligible for migration. Take the network adapter TCP/IP settings, I don't a migration happening for that. I don't think UWP is suitable for such information density. And in my opinion the UWP panel is less discoverable.

" I don't think UWP is suitable for such information density. "

This may be true but it doesn't speak well for UWP.

The most recent release of WinUI/UWP makes it easier to create high-density UI with a new Compact sizing option for the stock controls:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/style/sp...

Isn't UWP dead now, or am I confusing that with another alphabetized Windows dev framework that was recently shelved?

Everyone seems to have their own definitions of what is or isn't "dead" or what is or isn't UWP, but as far as Windows native development is concerned, they are still producing new versions of WinUI with new features and new versions of Windows are still adding new WinRT APIs. https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/blob/master/d...

I agree. I would have been fine if the new control panel superseded the old version but since Win8 we have this schizophrenic situation where we have two control panels that both have features the other version doesn't have. Win10 is a little better but you still need the old panel for plenty of things.

At the very least, can we have the same font size on the control panels... This junk that's inherited from Windows 8 has random huge fonts all over.

Same font? How about starting with having the same font renderer that actually respects font rendering settings?

I mean, it is ridiculous. I have disabled antialiasing so most GUI text uses crisp aliased fonts as i like them. Then i open the settings app and it ignores the setting while using some font rendering with blurry antialiasing without even subpixel antialiasing. If i open an Explorer window (with, e.g., Win+E), it uses the settings i've set and has antialiasing disabled but if go to the address bar (This PC) and type "Control Panel" and press enter to open it, it uses antialiasing and this time it is subpixel antialiasing! WTF!

And the cherry on top? There is a "View by:" (Category, Large Icons, Small Icons) list at the top right where the "View by:" text is not antialiased (as i have set it), but the selected option right next to it uses subpixel antialiasing!

Come on.

My fear with all this is we will end up where we started. The same settings but with extra whitespace so you can nominally use it on a tablet.

Microsoft have never been able to show the restraint that Apple have when it comes to this stuff.

The new stuff is high DPI aware plus I'm pretty sure is even VR ready.

Microsoft most assuredly has a plan.

You would get less room between elements if you disabled DPI awareness.

I think the settings app is just a poor imitation of the Mac preferences panel. Preferences panel gives the appearance of the major settings, all in one place. You can only have one module, like network, or printers, selected at one time. Settings app tries to do something similar, but for some reason this is more frustrating on Windows than MacOS.

About the only thing I use the settings app for are Windows updates. Everything else, I start from the run menu if I know the command or launch from the control panel. Because invariably the legacy control panel applet exposes features I need, and the settings app is rudimentary.

Microsoft should be embarrassed at this mess. I suppose they'll eventually almost complete the settings app before moving onto something they consider better. I don't know what's necessary to fix it, and likely it's far more involved that I can imagine, but Microsoft has resources at their disposal that would be the envy of all but the largest companies.

Rather than rolling this out piecemeal, over the course of however many years, they could have just gotten it right all at once. What we have now is just sloppy, a beta-quality looking mishmash. It reminds me of the old days of Linux on the desktop with various apps running different gui toolkits.

I'm sure this situation exists for justifiable reasons, but I don't have to like the end result even when fixing it is difficult and expensive.

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