Comment by graypegg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by graypegg | Hacker News Reader

Contrapoint: your application isn't special enough to break patterns.

Opening a calendar application, clicking on the "Event" menu, and being given options to make a new calendar makes as much sense as opening the "File" menu and seeing the same options.

If you split it up so any menu item that verbs a noun, had a top level menu named by that noun, you'd end up with New/Delete/etc actions being split into many menus, which feels just as wrong.

"File" works because of inertia, and people have a feeling of what should be in there:

    - new thing
    - save thing
    - copy thing
    - open another thing
    - rename thing
    - send this thing somewhere
    - import a thing in another format/export thing in another format
    - close thing, but don't quit, send me to some start screen please

It's vaguely related to the file/container you're looking at, but I wouldn't even say that's hugely important to most people's use of the file menu. It just has to have those things in it because honestly, it's pretty consistent. Other than a few examples in the article (Find My with it's always-disabled options, Reeder clearly having already moved all of it's menus into Account/Subscription/Item nouns) the file menu lines up with what I expect to be in it. Maybe that's me stuck inside my own bubble?

The example you're giving is for an application that operates on files. In that case, naming the menu "Files" obviously makes sense.

But the obvious example of what op is talking about is Pidgin, an instant messenger. The first menu is called "Conversations". It has actions for operating on conversations. The application can't open files, or save files. At least not in the same sense as Notepad, Paint, Audacity, etc.

The calendar example is from the article, their suggestion is "Event"! But also, yeah that's a weak choice for me to pull from.

I guess my point is "File" is just consistent, not that it accurately represents the way the application functions. A lot of UX conversations come down to the naive-user experience, but truth be told, you're only a naive user for a short amount of time. Maybe a week into using macOS for example, I think you'll just mentally map "File" to that list of actions I have in my comment, and you're golden.

Yeah maybe conceptually it's weird that "New Tab" in safari is a File action... but also that's where every application puts its "New Thing" actions. If I want the application to give me a blank slate, I will look for File > New *. "File" is just a word.

If every application had it's own place for those actions that were named for the noun they act on, sure, the naive user touching a desktop OS for the first time is going to breeze through tasks a tiny bit faster, at the expense of the location/name/grouping of menu items now requiring relearning on an app-by-app basis.

There's an alternate history where the file menu is actually labled "Do" or something, and I would make the same argument. "I know what's in the Do menu."

I agree with you about naive-user experience, and world-weary users. Nobody is a naive user in 2026. My oldest kid is 25. He learned to read so he could understand other players and NPCs in RuneScape. He's never been a naive user.

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