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Comment by gamepsys | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

“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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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