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Comment by sriramk | Hacker News Reader

My issue with the active corners is that they are impossible to use with multiple monitors. Fitt's Law actively works against it; instead of being able to slam your mouse, you have to gingerly move it to the right spot.

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Nevermind the fact that there are no visual cues for the user to know that the corners actually do something. Same with closing a program, it's a hidden gesture. Those sentences deserve many exclamation points and expletives.

If this is supposed to be easy to use then it should be intuitive.

There's an overshoot buffer. Move past the corner and then slide back to invoke the tip in the bottom left. For the charms, move past and then swing your mouse up into the middle. Kind of like a U shape.

On KDE, the corners just move to the most extreme screen. So any action set to a left corner will work from that corner of the left screen, while any actions set to a right corner will work from that corner on the right screen. This still isn't perfect, but works fairly well in practice. I'm not sure it's directly applicable to Windows 8 because I haven't tried it yet, but it's something to think about.

Don't know about KDE but I have the same problem with Unity. I wound up physically moving my monitors around because Unity really, really likes to be on the extreme left.

I have had no issues with having my main monitor to the left or to the right. I have a laptop and at home my external monitor is to the right while at work it's to the left; KDE handles either version perfectly. The "hot" corners move to the extremes, as appropriate, and everything else works well too. In fact, over all, KDE has been the best system for multiple monitors I've used (choosing from several versions of Windows, OS X, Unity and Gnome 2).

There are a lot of new shortcut keys alleviate that problem a lot.

How many people who use Windows on a regular basis know anything but using their mouse to interact with the OS? How many normal users do you know that know the current Windows shortcut keys? Expecting people to learn new ones is a bit silly in my opinion.

How many normal users have multiple monitors? There might be a lot, but we're going up a notch above normal users and towards power users here.

Where I work many of the Photoshop users have multiple monitors and aren't power users by any stretch. It is very unlikely they would be familiar with any shortcuts in windows beyond ctrl-c/v/x and the "Windows" key.

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