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Comment by user3939382 | Hacker News Reader

Just to provide a diversity of opinion: I've heard basically nothing but positive feedback about Notepad++ over the years. However, I tried it out for about 10 seconds before closing it and never looked back. The, what I call "millions of tiny buttons" interface is ugly and distracting. I've never liked IDEs or other apps with this UI style. I use a JetBrains IDE now that has just as many features but the UI is not cluttered with millions of tiny buttons and tool ribbons.

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I greatly miss those tool bars. I think it's ironic that modern UI strives to be less cluttered than ever before while computer monitors are larger than ever before.

* They encourage curiosity about previously undiscovered functionality. It improves feature discoverability.

* It's way easier to find the correct tool bar icon than trying to hunt for a feature inside the menus.

* If some toolbars are highlighted or disabled can tell you information about the state of the document you are editing.

There is no "One size fits all" UI, sadly.

Absolute beginners should be shown a basic interface front and center, with a clear way to access more advanced features. More advanced users may benefit from a plethora of rich controls, all shown together. Experts may want to remove the visual clutter because they access features from keyboard without looking.

Good software offers a way to achieve all of these, and often more customization.

Visual Studio (not Code) lets you move it all around, remove pieces, and add things. It's one of the reasons I love Visual Studio. I otherwise use JetBrains for other languages, or when on other OS' it was a shame VS for Mac went away, but I assume adoption was not very high.

Just give me a view->toolbars-> checklist and I'll sort it out.

FreeCAD does this well.

Microsoft Office from 97 - 2003 handled toolbar UI almost perfectly in my opinion. As a young kid I discovered many advanced and obscure features of Word and Excel through the customize feature.

I really disliked the relatively dumbed down ribbon UI when it first came out.

> It's way easier to find the correct tool bar icon than trying to hunt for a feature inside the menus.

What? I am just completely confused by this—menu items are labeled in clear textual language, sorted roughly by functionality. icons greatly depend on cultural context. Looking at a screenshot of notepad++ I could would understand maybe a third of the icons and could guess at another third at best.

That said, it's not that big of a deal—I'd probably just disable the toolbar rather than figure it out. I don't really use the mouse outside of selecting regions of text anyway.

Once you learn a toolbar, it just becomes visual and muscle memory. Not unlike using hotkeys to access something hidden under a couple layers of menus.

Sure, but that's very different from "feature discovery". I totally get this with the floppy-disk icon (which is, ironically enough, now a terrible visual metaphor for persisting to local storage outside of cultural context), but I have no clue what "up arrow on top of down arrow" means, nor what the ¶ icon would do—start a new paragraph? Select the current paragraph? Open some kind of paragraph outline?

Granted, I don't use windows so it's entirely possible I'm just showing my ass here.

The toolbar buttons all have hover text to ease the learning, ¶ is "Show All Characters" where "characters" mean stuff like Carriage Return and whitespace. Microsoft Word users are probably familiar with this meaning.

I have no idea what "up arrow on top of down arrow" is though, because I don't have that button.

I find it depends on how many things are in the toolbar, and if the icons are actually icons or monochromatic glyphs.

A toolbar that’s populated only with the most frequently used functions and employs full color, uniquely shaped icons can be visually grokked in an instant, whereas a densely packed toolbar full of glyphs is inscrutable at a glance.

I think an argument can be made for toolbars if they’re customizable with no holes barred on customizability (looking at you, Firefox, with your non-optional hamburger menu) and can be hidden entirely, should the user choose to do so. For me, toolbars as they were commonly implemented in Cocoa apps for the first half of OS X’s history are the model example here, which offer all the above.

It’s when they’re not fully customizable and aren’t optional when they grate on me.

“less cluttered than ever before while computer monitors are larger than ever before.”

Less cluttered but with more white space, especially in the vertical direction which is particularly cramped since the change in monitor aspect ratios so the toolbars have less functionality but take up more of the usable screen space.

Progress is great…

Yeah but vertical toolbars are a thing. I love the vertical tabs option in Edge.

True,me too. But now that copilot keeps popping up on the other side, that’s starting to feel cramped too.

I used to put the task bar vertically down the side of the monitor as well for the same reason but Microsoft won’t let me do that anymore.

This is one of the reasons why the only upgrade path available for me after Windows 10 is Linux.

Which is pretty much the the thing keeping me from ditching edge, and the thing that made me use it in the first place. It just works.

I've tried the various hacks available for Firefox to achieve a similar result, but nothing comes close to Edge here. Closest I got to edge is Midori, though unfortunately that one is still pretty buggy.

The problem with tool bars is that usually you cannot guess what 80% of the icons mean.

If you hover over the icon, a tooltip pops up to help remind/train you on what the icons represent.

Takes one second to disable all that. I've used notepad++ forever and not once have I used those buttons, indeed they are useless. Your opinion is valid but I never understand using a tool with options and acting like the defaults are the only option.

That is true, but it takes more than 1 second to find out about it.

I think the users a software like NP++ is aimed for are willing to spend more than 1 second to find out about this option. It appears that you're not one of those users ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, and it also appears that the things how they appear to you, might be wrong. I know about that option as I use npp since well over a decade. But I can still say the general interface is bad and I only use npp via key shortcuts. And if there are other options that provide a clearer initial experience, I can see why newcomers choose those instead.

The new Jetbrains ui is hard to like. It’s form over function. The old ui (thankfully still available). Having to hover over a hamburger button just to cause it to draw the menu bar options then slide the mouse across to what you want is annoying.

The new commit window alt+0 is better, the old modal always felt tacked on when everything else is a docked panel.

> The new Jetbrains ui is hard to like. It’s form over function.

I'd like my JetBrains IDEs better with a 10x speedup. The new redesign isn't bad if you memorize keyboard shortcuts :-)

> The new redesign isn't bad if you memorize keyboard shortcuts :-)

Contradictio in terminis

You can use the keyboard shortcut with old UI.

I still like at the old UI.

When you do overlapping windows, those non standard chrome are great distraction.

> You can use the keyboard shortcut with old UI

That's the joke :-)

With time, you start using the menu very rarely, because keyboard shortcuts are so much faster. No menu bar means more screen space when working on a laptop.

I usually switch off the menu bar in Emacs, and I don't even know if it can be turned on in Vim.

Ahh I’d disagree with that, I’ve been solely IntelliJ since around 2011/2012[1] and all the alt+N tool windows, the ctrl+shift+a (besides being the original feature, it’s faster than shift+shift and I never have confusion about whether I’m looking for an action or a file or … that shift+shift view just never made sense to me). Basically all the core shortcuts are memory muscle at this point but the menu is useful for browsing lesser used features. Ctrl+shift+a is slow enough at redrawing that you don’t want to be using it to search / try to remember the name of a feature.

[1] well except for a brief 2 year VSCode spell but i came back a year or so ago and have restored my all products subscription

I tried it. The first week I shared your opinion. But then something flipped. I configured and learned hotkeys to hide the file/services/... pane and ended up with something I can only describe as 'calm'. Only 1 or 2 panes of code visible, and all functions hidden but available.

The main detractor is indeed the hamburger menu. Vscode had ctrl-p, emacs has alt-x, and both provide a way to search for some function to execude. I hope Jetbrains is hiding something similar in its innnards, but haven't found it yet. Ctrl ctrl isn't it, at least for me.

I went all-in on Jetbrains Ultimate last year without regrets. The thing is great and powerfull, but it is hard to find what you need in there, and hard to find out what is the purpose of some functionality. I've actually lost usefull functionality: Something usefull but I don't remember the name and can't find it in the menus. I should spend some time spellunking in there. Even so, I hope they find something better than the hamburger or the zillion hotkeys.

Jetbrains has Double Shift and Ctrl+Shift+A.

Thanks, all of you.

I played with it, meanwhile, and it's not really 'it'. E.g. settings gives me 4 different options, all doing different things.

emacs and vscode treat this function as a primary entry to the functionality, and have tuned the names and namespacing to this kind of usage. E.g. vscode has micropython:configure project.

This is a search function for the existing gui with reuse of existing names. As the surrounding context is lost, it is hard to say what a name means.

I like the new UI as well. There's always a learning curve, but after using it for months I haven't found any reason to switch back.

ctrl+ctrl is "run anything" (I tend to use ctrl+alt+r for the different but similar run menu instead).

I think what you want is "Actions" - which is default to "shift shift" and then click on a tab, or (ctrl/cmd)+shift+a to jump directly to that tab.

Interestingly in the JetBrains emacs keybindings set, alt-x does exactly what you want. So, it's bindable, and you can use it in ANY keybinding, emacs or not.

Ctrl-Shift-A, or something. There is a dialog with universal search for actions, files, classes....

FYI, it's possible to make the menu bar always visible in settings.

Aha, I’ve just turned this on, I’m going to give new ui a whirl again.

FYI you can configure old UI to not show modal dialog for commit. Took me too long to learn this and this is how I use it now. I despise the new UI. Every tool don't have to become another popular tool (vscode). I find the new UI harder to use.

I like all the buttons and menus etc visible right there without needing extra clicks. When working with colleagues I can see them struggling to find features that I have been using with old UI for my advantage because it's all out there in front of you and they don't even it's possible.

The old ui was much more compact (even compared to compact mode on new ui) and maximised real estate for code over ui elements, which is what you want from a coding editor. It's definitely form over function here and yet another regressive move in the steps Jetbrains seems to be taking of late.

Tiny buttons toolbars were the norm for decades in, say, Windows Explorer and Microsoft Word, before Microsoft transitioned to the "Ribbon" style in 2007. Personally I think that people who enjoy those buttons do so for nostalgia reasons, but they are not the worst to use once you remember where each tool is and what each tool's icon looks like.

> Tiny buttons toolbars were the norm for decades (...) before Microsoft transitioned to the "Ribbon" style in 2007.

The Ribbon still feels to me like that "new thing" Microsoft did since some version of Office... and you're telling me it was 2007?!! Oh my...

A bit before that time I already moved to Open/LibreOffice, and never really used any Windows past 7, so I've missed a whole UI paradigm transition that now makes Windows feel like a complete stranger to me.

There's now a whole generation of 20 year old programmers who have never used the toolbars of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Pull-down menus are so obtrusive! You SHOULD prefer to hunt and hunt and hunt for the button you want. The future is now and it sucks.

What you find ugly and distracting I find essential to functioning in the app. I can't stand it when I'm trying to find some feature that was hidden so the UI would look cleaner.

To me it is a tool for select jobs. Mainly use it for parsing log files. Handles gigabyte files ease unlike Windows notepad. It also is great with regex searching to filter useful log content with cascading results. Temporary scratch pad, for constructing SQL statements, that retains unsaved files upon OS or user closing. Not my go-to for coding and project maintenance. Still a great tool.

Notepad++ is what I have for any random file format I need to right click and open quickly!

There's Emedit as a commercial notepad like tool. It's even better than notepad++ for large files because it'll stream in the data as you scroll rather than trying to load all of it at once.

Check out klogg for log viewing on Windows, I recently switched to it.

I have used Notepad++ for more than 10 years and I don't think I have ever tried replacing my IDE with it. I don't think it should be use as an IDE replacement but a file editor.

It is the other way around: 10 yeas ago I was using Notepad++ for writing small apps and I replaced it with IDE (VS Code). It makes no sense to replace a decent IDE with Notepad++.

My advice is to just turn the toolbar off (Settings -> Preferences -> General -> Toolbar -> Hide). I find it easier to skim through menus. You can turn off almost all of the extra UI elements if you want, which makes the interface very clean.

Funny that something as simple as hiding a toolbar requires diving through 5 steps. Doesn't it just offer that option upon right-click? It sounds natural and expected to me for a toolbar to do so.

It's really two or three steps -- select menu item, dialogue box page is already selected by default, click on checkbox. I was giving the full navigation.

Personally, I find that making every part of the UI an active control makes it easy to do things by mistake, especially hiding elements, which often doesn't have an obvious way to reverse the process. For one-time UI setup, I don't mind going through a dialogue box.

I just tried it and was surprised that it doesn't offer Right-Click option to customize/turn off the toolbar. There was a period in Windows software when that level of customizability was expected.

I hate cluttered flat surfaces as much as the next guy, but I don't put my toaster away when I'm not using it. It's stays right on the counter because it's convenient for it to be there.

> I don't put my toaster away when I'm not using it

I actually do lol

Aren't you just generating crumbs at two locations now? The kitchen bench and cupboard? Possibly the floor too due to moving the toaster?

All depends on how much space you got (and large space needs cleaning). I have a food dehydrator. It is a nice tool but too large so it is in the attic, gathering dust. I also have two airfryers. These are used daily. However the toaster is rarely used. Only thing is, would you put such away when still hot? Needs to cool down first.

Notepad++ originated at a time when there weren't many code editors for most of the new, growing languages (perl, python, js), or for editing xml and json, especially on windows. Many of the "good" code editors were expensive and enterprisey, or they were limited to linux, or they had an extremely steep learning curve (vim, emacs). Notepad++ worked on everything, was free, installed quickly, and it was fast. I've used it to replace hardcoded values in binary files before. I think most of the people who are praising it are remembering how valuable it was 20 years ago. I don't know anyone that still uses Notepad++.

I have it on a few thousand servers in my department, mostly as a Notepad that can do more, like comment color or editing small config files of all sorts. It is far from the days I used to write entire small apps in Notepad ++, but we still use it and there is no plan to replace it unless they do something that puts us in danger (ex: stop fixing bugs/security issues).

It's been the "standard" editor at my place of employment, but no one objects to other editors or IDEs being used instead. Our workstations are all Windows, so it's a decent default to install for everyone.

notepad++ was really great for simple syntax highlighting on windows, when good clients were either slow or costed money.

It supported a lot of languages.

Also, the original Notepad++ is unabashedly native to Windows, with none of the limitations or expense of cross-platform toolkits like Qt. So it's lightweight and responsive even on lowest-specced boxes.

I use Notepad++ on Linux, ran the installer, works, it auto updates just like it did on Windows, WINE enables it to run just fine. I use it every day for small files like my TODO, Notes and Scrap files.

But that is a recent developement? Some years ago the experience under WINE with npp was not great.

(might be also 10 years, since I tried it the last time)

Could be, I can't remember when it didn't run well but WINE has improved greatly the past 5 years especially.

> The, what I call "millions of tiny buttons" interface is ugly and distracting.

I agree. I used to use N++ when that sort of interface was common everywhere. It didn't look as out of place.

These days I find it too jarring and either use Sublime Text 3 or just regular Windows Notepad for scratch notes (now that it doesn't prompt to save on close anymore). No buttons.

As a longtime Notepad++ user, I hate those buttons as well. Fortunately, the settings contain the option to hide the menu, the icons, the buttons on the tabs, the status bar, etc. resulting in a very minimalistic experience, which is how I use it.

I recommend giving it another look.

>The, what I call "millions of tiny buttons" interface is ugly and distracting.

That's a feature. It's a GUI harkening back to Windows Explorer Classic, aka the interface style used from Windows 95 through Windows XP.

Npp is a code editor, and you're comparing it to an IDE. Apples and oranges.

Both are fruits. The comparison applies here I think :-)

The code editor is the primary function of the IDE. I did mention other apps because I wasn’t making that direct comparison but if I was I’d say it’s more like a peeled orange (the code editor) to the unpeeled orange (the IDE).

It depends on what you use it for, I guess. I'm not a programmer so I use it as a replacement for windows notepad. I don't know what most of the buttons do and I just ignore them.

Maybe you can customize it. I am not a user but you will avoid good programs because of this instant reaction. IMO, I would check if the toolbar and key shortcuts can be customized.

Re-training propaganda: [only the JetBrains products should be used, repeat after me...].

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