Comment by donmcronald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by donmcronald | Hacker News Reader

Here's a blog post where they have a screenshot of the new UI [1]. The biggest thing that always annoys me with UI redesigns is when something with a good label gets replaced with a flat icon and whitespace.

For example, what was wrong with the vertical labels on the left (Project, etc.)? How is an icon and extra whitespace better for my productivity? I want to see what the ellipses on the left are hiding. If it's a menu with a couple items that could have simply been put in the newly created vertical whitespace, I'd like to know what the reasoning is for that. It's not like I'm using their apps on my phone, right?

Sometimes I feel like all I've got is a hamburger menu and 2 feet of (horizontal) whitespace. What an awful trend. I also prefer colored icons. Distinct colors help me remember and I can find things more quickly.

1. https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/05/take-part-in-the-new...

I really prefer the new look. I don't need or want labels in my field of view all day for buttons that I learned the purposes of years ago. If there's a new icon I don't understand, I can simply hover over it for a second.

I tend to rely on keyboard shortcuts and fall back to Search Everywhere (double shift), so the first thing I do on a new install is hide the menu bar.

I find the extra bit of whitespace helps with less travel and accuracy when switching to mouse.

The new UI has been a net positive in my personal experience.

Wow, that looks terrible! Thanks for sharing the preview. I really dislike vertical UI elements, and these are much worse than they were before- almost entirely EMPTY. These new vertical ribbons are at least twice as large as the old ones, eating up valuable screen real estate and managing to be less usable and discoverable in the process. I really hope they U-turn on that!

Thanks. Was not aware of the preview. Going by the single screenshot, I could have sworn it’s vscode! Not sure how I feel about it (after all it’s just a tool but sheesh some visual differentiation would be nice).

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