Designing Aero Snap (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Designing Aero Snap (2009)

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The Windows UI team did a lot of great work around this time. I remember reading a post on the Windows Shell blog where they explained an ingenious they made to explorer. They added some margin on the left hand side of the detailed listview. Try it out and select a file, there is a blank space of about 15 pixels to the left of the row. This is so that you always have space to start a rubberband selection, even if the window is full with files. (You may also start it over the greyed out columns, but if you start on the name column, you start dragging the file instead.)

I wonder if anybody archived the blog post somewhere? I cannot find it in archive.org unfortunately.

I've never seen this feature implemented anywhere else (except in an unpublished Gtk app of mine where it was a pain to implement :-)).

This is a feature I often miss on many Linux file explorers. In Windows, there's always a way to right click on an empty area to get the context menu that allows you to create a new file. On my Linux file managers, you have to scroll to the bottom or zoom out if the amount of files lines up exactly with what could theoretically fit.

It's the little bits of attention to detail that really made me appreciate the Windows 7 UI.

For future reference, here is the blog (called Shell: revealed): https://web.archive.org/web/20071015032920/http://shellrevea...

There is a post about the inconsistent wizard titlebars in Vista and 7, for example. (There is a "back" button in the top left, but there is space above it. The reason is they didn't want to or couldn't do ownerdraw stuff on the titlebar, and then later stuck with it. The original plan was to have it look like in the Windows Vista/7 installer, where the back button is vertically centered in the titlebar). https://web.archive.org/web/20070206051159/http://shellrevea...

Coming from macOS, I have to say that this feature is extremely neat. This feature alone makes working with multiple windows on a large display so much nicer on Windows than on Mac. On the Mac you have all those different modes — full screen, side by side, resize — and confusing ways to trigger the modes: click green button, alt click green button, drag to top of screen and wait, etc.

The Aero Snap feature was something I immediately understood when I started using Windows, and I learned about it just from the feedback you get when you drag a window to the side. You can see that they tested it with real users.

It feels like Apple didn't test their feature with real users at all. It's bad on the desktop, but it's even worse on iPad — I only ever triggered the multi-tasking features accidentally and ended up confused what was going on.

There's a $0.99 app for macOS called Magnet that implements aero snap like functionality. I'd highly recommend.

Additionally an app called Spectacle for keyboard accelerated window management.

I found that once I got used to the keyboard shortcuts, my window management on macOS became second nature.

https://www.spectacleapp.com/

I think Rectangle is the spiritual successor to Spectacle.

https://rectangleapp.com

That developer has some really cool apps. Just switched to macOS from Windows and already discovered there’s no way to mimic middle click on the touchpad. This person has an app for that!

Wow, now that you mention it this person does have some cool apps. For example, Hookshot (https://hookshot.app) does snapping with your cursor anywhere on an app.

I would recommend it as well. Once you start getting used to the hotkeys it really speeds things up. They even have commands to send app windows to other monitors.

Thanks for the tip. It seems the dev increased the price (it costs 8€ now). I bought it nevertheless.

Unfortunately, the app seems to work nowhere near as well as the Windows feature. Might be because of my multi-monitor setup, but it seems to do something different everytime I hit an edge, and trying to hit an edge between two displays is difficult.

Long-time user of BetterTouchTool here, which implements this feature as well. If you just want the snap functionality they also offer this as a cheaper ($2.99), stand-alone version with BetterSnapTool[0].

[0] https://folivora.ai/bettersnaptool

I’m a pretty big fan of penc. It’s has snap like functionality placed on gestures on the trackpad and is free https://deniz.co/penc/

There's rectangle app that does aero-snap and much more, and it is opensource: https://rectangleapp.com/ I been using it for a while and love it.

Seeing the beautiful, uncluttered, elegant simplicity of those screenshots makes me quite nostalgic. The lack of bullshit and the aesthetic coherence of that UI is really something I miss. The last decade has been disastrous for Windows, experience-wise. Wish we could have the Windows 7 experience with the core and security improvements of Windows 10!

People joke about the year of linux on the desktop, but it remains the best place to create an environment you like. XFCE is a good starting point if you're an old school windows fan.

What's a good X11 or Wayland environment if I want a lightweight low-latency environment with Super+Number app launching and Super+arrow or drag snapping/tiling? Xfce with Docklike is X11-based, and gets me everything except for window snapping/tiling (when I try configuring the keyboard shortcuts, it doesn't work).

Openbox is super configurable, and I've definitely done similar things to what you just descrubed.

Last time I tried swapping out xfwm with openbox it was pretty easy.

> Seeing the beautiful, uncluttered, elegant simplicity of those screenshots makes me quite nostalgic

You're nostalgic for a time that never existed. While I agree that Windows 7 was more coherent than Windows Vista and Windows XP, every single Windows release has had its associated "bullshit" (as you put it):

* Windows 98: Advertising on the desktop (Active Channels)

* Windows XP: "Fischer-Price" default UI skin and chunky, toy-like iconography.

* Windows Vista: The whole OS release was maligned - and this site collected it all: https://web.archive.org/web/20110515033457/http://www.aerota...

* Windows 7: (Okay, I'll admit I can't immediately think of any major power-user criticism of Windows 7)

* Windows 8: Start Screen, terrible store apps, the DWM cannot be disabled, etc.

* Windows 10: Criticism of telemetry and data-collection, and how there's still some leftovers from Windows 3.11 or Windows 95 (I forget) lying around:

I'd say 7 was one of the best Windows, but even that had a lot of UI inconsistency and clutter. Still, better than most. Not as cohesive as my MATE desktop.

> every single Windows release

I don't see NT 4 on that list!

NT 4, 2000, and 7 were all fairly low-bullshit, i think.

You also haven't listed Me, which probably needs a whole comment to itself.

When I first got Windows 7, I was annoyed by it placing libraries and homegroups in Windows Explorer's sidebar. Though Windows 10 is worse, with 3D Objects, the OS shilling OneDrive, Edge, mandatory Microsoft accounts, etc.

Although the screenshots are indeed uncluttered, they're definitely not simple. There are many clickable items, unnecessarily large windows with wasted empty space, icons that are hard to read unless you have experience with them redundant information, rarely used bars and text fields...

Windows UI became just too busy starting with xp. The last sober windows UI was windows 2000.

Windows 7 was really when Microsoft took a bunch of features that had been in Linux display managers for ages (tiling, window snapping) and added them to their own OS.

I don't think Microsoft copy Snap from Linux. I use Ubuntu 8.10, and it doesn't have snap, I do try KDE4 and it also not has anything like Snap

XFCE had it for ages

What ages we talk about? Because Windows 7 also aged.

Like 2000 and earlier ages:

https://web.archive.org/web/20000619002010/http://www.xfce.o...

The "Windows snapping" in early Xfce version mean to stick the windows together or with the screen edge (Doesn't resize the window). It doesn't work like the snap on Windows 7. The name is similar, but the function is different.

This is a patch for Xfwm4 to make it work like Windows 7 (2012) https://launchpad.net/~fossfreedom/+archive/ubuntu/xfwm4

Actually me and friends made fun of windows user when windows 7 was released. Most of those effects were things we had on compiz for a few years but with MUCH more power.

Meanwhile it only took 3 decades for Linux folks to realize it's not a crazy idea to want to open a handle to a process and wait for it to exit.

Win7 taskbar was also excellent copy (or improvement) of OSX Dock.

I think Aero Snap was originally shown off first as a Windows 7 feature when they announced it but was quickly duplicated by Linux DEs before it even launched.

With ultrawide displays we need an update of this paradigm. Maybe we need to introduce the concept of areas on a display that partially take over the role of a physical screen.

For starters I have just adjusted my MATE desktop to vertically maximise the window on double clicking the titlebar.

I use Windows, and there's a third-party application called WindowGrid which is pretty cool to use.

It splits your screen space into a configurably dense grid (I use it at 16x9 cells, for example, so they're roughly square), and you can position windows on it using mouse gestures.

Start dragging a window, move your mouse to where you want one of the corners to be, hold right click, and drag it where you want it to fit to.

It's basically a manual tiling WM, but it's quite useful.

Here's a tiny example of the usage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ziWVGyjwdw

Check out the Windows 10 PowerToys https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

With it you can hold Shift when moving a window, and the window will snap to a predefined grid. There are also other nice tools, like a Color picker when you press Win+C.

this changed my life with my three-monitor setup (1 portrait, 2 landscape) at work when I discovered it a few months ago! I can't imagine going back to life without it now, it's so useful.

On Linux there are a whole bunch of tiling window managers that do this. i3 is probably the most famous one. I use Pop_OS shell on Manjaro to combine GNOME and tiled windows (with sadly very limited customizability on window positioning) which works quite well; it's tiling windows without the need to remember a billion system specific shortcuts.

On Windows you now have FancyZones, part of the Windows power pack thing Microsoft provides on Github, which allows you to draw areas you can snap windows into. Windows 11 even has some common window layouts built right in.

More traditional Linux desktops (like MATE) will probably try to avoid this paradigm, as they're more about sticking to what works than experimenting with new stuff. However, I think I see a trend where some sort of tiling is becoming part of more and more desktop environments.

"For starters I have just adjusted my MATE desktop to vertically maximise the window on double clicking the titlebar.For starters I have just adjusted my MATE desktop to vertically maximise the window on double clicking the titlebar."

On Windows, you can double click at top/bottom edge of window to vertically maximize

Reading to the bottom, I notice that they talk about a cursor effect (light glow) when you've hit the snap trigger. I never noticed this on Windows 7, and it's definitely not in Windows 10 - did it ever make it into production?

It is there on Windows 7 and even 10 (just tested it to be sure)! When you drag a window to the side, a sort of circle/drop effect appears around the cursor. I think this is what they are referring to, but I might be mistaken.

That's what's also shown in the screenshot, so I'm pretty sure that's what they're referring to and the feature has always been there, indeed.

It's possible the effect won't show up if you have special effects turned off in the windows performance settings ("adjust the appearance and performance of Windows")

AH I do! Forgot about that.

> In the scenarios below you’ll notice sequences of interactions that are fully written out. Sequences like: select the window, click the caption button, and then resize the window.

This is interesting. I wonder if the caption button step is a leftover from previous design iterations, where you had to click a button on the title-bar to Snap a window...

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