Hacker News Reader

Comment by jpeter | Hacker News Reader

Is this also the reason why there are no tabs in windows explorer?

I'm a TreeStyleTab user in Firefox with always >200 Tabs open. But I never got the idea of Tabs in Explorer (or Finder for that matter).

When I use multiple Explorer Views, most of the time I do it, to interact between them. This is not the case for websites.

So for drag and drop interactions, two windows always beat the drag, hover over the other tab until it catches my intend to switch to this tab, and drop it there workflow.

The same goes for copy and paste. Ctrl+c, alt+tab, ctrl+v. I'm sure there is a corresponding command to cycle through the tabs, but alt+tab is deep muscle memory, that it beats this command always.

> I'm sure there is a corresponding command to cycle through the tabs, but alt+tab is deep muscle memory, that it beats this command always.

It's ctrl+tab. And shift will reverse direction in both. It's nice and related.

And then there's MacOS, where cmd-tab doesn't cycle through windows, but through applications. Cmd-` cycles through windows of the same application. Because apparently, using multiple applications and multiple windows means you're a bad boy and need to be punished.

Weird, I never saw it as a punishment. It's actually a lot faster to get where you need to go, in my experience. Not having to filter through both application and window makes it take slightly less thought and effort than flipping through just one application's windows. Plus switching between applications is a lot easier when there are only five listed instead of five + 20 windows.

I guess it's dependent on the number of applications and windows you have going at any given time.

Generalized tabs accros even different programs is an experiment that has been attempted a few years ago in a few insider builds, but has been quickly abandoned. IMO it was too complex from a UX pov, duplicated some of the use cases of virtual desktops, etc. Maybe had they tried tabs for single applications, it would have succeeded. In this alternate universe we may not have the new Windows Terminal program though (IIRC adding tabs specifically in console.exe was prevented because they were about to start this grand inter-program tab design instead, and Windows Terminal was started after the experiment failed)

It is a power user feature which most users won't will not appreciate. I am using Mac for about 7 years now, and almost never use tabs in Finder.

Tabs are great for saving screen real estate. Finder windows are relatively small and, with large screens, the need to cram two or more folders into the same window ceases to exist. It’s easier to remember the window to the right is my docs folder and the one to the left is the downloads one.

I stopped using Windows file explorer more than a decade ago when I learned about spatial file managers.

I have been in love with - and 10x more productive using - TotalCommander!

The ability to >98% of the file related tasks from the keyboard is very addictive!!!

You have confused terminology. TC is an example of orthodox file manager. Explorer is an example of spatial file manager.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com