A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts
devblogs.microsoft.com
devblogs.microsoft.com
Yeah and, sadly, those framework implementations are all mired in some amount of bollocks due to lack of care, attention, or interest from their creators. And by bollocks I mean they either behave differently or do less.
But I very much miss the days of consistent UX across Windows applications, or indeed applications on any other OS.
I don’t mind if you want a custom look and feel for your application: I very much do mind if your widgets don’t behave like other widgets of the same type or, at least, where any variance is at least a superset of OS level functionality rather than a crippled subset.
I was always frustrated by how hard Microsoft made this as time wore on and they moved through more and more UI frameworks, and then offerings like CEF and Electron entered the mix as well. The UI story on Windows started getting particularly messy around 2007 or so and has been in an awful state of confusion for at least 15 years now.
I literally have no idea what I’d use to develop a Windows desktop app nowadays and, honestly, none of the options fill me with enthusiasm. With more recent desktop experiments, partly because whilst I might want them to run on Windows I don’t primarily work on Windows, I’ve gone the Rust + Qt route simply because it offers native performance and it doesn’t feel like I’m getting rug pulled by either set of creators any time soon.
I would go further and say that I don’t want a custom look and feel for each app unless the app is a game, especially if your app is a regular line of business app. The default Win32 widgets are good enough. The default Cocoa widgets are also good enough.
Also agree with you on both Win32 and Cocoa widgets.
Speaking of performance of media apps, I stopped using the official Spotify client after I found out about Spotifast [1]. Yes, it's vibecoded, but it feels so fast and light compared to the real client that I wonder why Spotify itself doesn't fix their official app.
Beyond the now-denied choice of UI color scheme I do not expect (or even desire) deriving any joy or pleasure from the look and feel of software I use. Most of my computing is for "work"-- be that my job, or paying bills, shopping, etc. I want the UI to get out of my way and, most of all, not to insult my 30+ years of muscle memory and visual intuition. I derive joy and pleasure from software that allows me to quickly accomplish my tasks with minimal thought or friction on my part.
I experience massive frustration with software using UI widgets that don't work like the native OS. Not having the standard keyboard shortcuts, for example, is a great way to make me hate your software. It's an immediate "tell" that I'm going to be disappointed if a program has bad tab order on its UI elements, for example.
Moreover, eschewing the time-tested and battle-hardened native UI widgets speaks to arrogance. It feels like an ego trip and it's almost certainly unearned. Random developers probably can't pull off a widget replacement that replicates all the nuance of the native. Good luck pulling off accessibility and internationalization, too. Even if they can how is reinventing that wheel a good use of their time?
My rage is amplified when I find bugs in software with non-native widgets. They had time to dick around with the widgets-- something already done for them in a vastly more competent and comprehensive manner for free-- but not to ship bug-free code for the software's actual purpose?
The same goes for animations, fades, gradients, etc. The vast majority of software I use is not special or dear to me. It's a tool. I don't want to, in a manner of speaking, look at pictures of the developers kids or vacations as a "toll" for using the software. Making software "pretty" is only self-serving and egotistical.
The problem starts when you want to ship to every device known to man but you only have the dev power to maybe ship it to the web—enter, Electron (and all that other similar crap).
Don’t blame it on the designers or the developers. This comes from above the worker bees.
Yeah, you lose some people with a shifting target, but it's easier to make them swallow 1% different every month than 50% different (to a competitor) all at once.
There's a document I've seen floating on the Interwebz, a copy of HIG for ancient Windows version, I think one of the 3.x ones. I distinctly remember it for having a note somewhere basically recognizing that giving some of the theming/customization options in the API is a bad idea, but customers want to brand their apps, so what can one do.
This is one of the problems that I can't see being solved, because it's purely social - we'd have to have someone go and tell every entrepreneur out there that branding is a fucking stupid idea and you should not do it, and actually be taken seriously.
I can't even imagine a world in which that is possible.
...and even if the app is a game, it can still make great use of Win32 controls creatively. Minesweeper is one example that comes with Windows, and I remember plenty of other casual (non-3d) games in the 90s/early 2000s making use of buttons, both ownerdrawn and stock, likely to avoid having to write their own hit-testing code.
I'd agree personally, but when you look at the huge success of things like WinAmp's themes back in the day, there clearly is (was?) a large market for it.
If a framework cannot provide you with the right looks, you have to to override it. Hence the mess.
The problem we face right now is that this has been flipped and applications are now forcing developer customizations onto users and removing any and all choice or customization. Up to and including ignoring and overriding OS level customization.
C#/.NET and WinForms is still a viable choice. Though for a new project I might try WPF, for a slightly more modern appearance.
Reasons? OK, this is going back about 20 years but, and without going on a massive ranty screed [EDIT: oops, failed], compare something like Swing's JTable to WinForms' DataGrid. One is a really nicely designed and abstracted component with a fully pluggable architecture and an out of the box capability to deal with an arbitrarily large data model (perhaps within the limits of 32-bit integers) and the other... isn't. I tried with DataGrid, I really did. I thought other developers at my employer were "doing it wrong" by reaching for third party controls from the likes of DevExpress and Actipro but... they weren't: I was wrong. If you wanted a proper table/grid control that was easy to customise and extend and wouldn't chunder on millions and millions of rows of data you forked over the money to DevExpress for their control and then you got on with your day solving your real problems that you could charge customers actual money for.
We leaned hard on third party control libraries from DevExpress (particularly grid and tree), Actipro (wizard), and Syncfusion (again, grid). To me, with WinForms, and bearing in mind I'd come from Java Swing (which is by no means perfect) it was really weird working with a UI toolkit where what came in the box wasn't sufficient to build any arbitrarily complex UI I might desire. Weird. And frustrating. Same for the lack of abstraction/separation of concerns. In my Java days, when I wanted a wizard I ripped the one out of NetBeans: I did that in at least two prior jobs using it as the basis for multiple wizards across the relevant applications.
And WPF... although architecturally a lot better, IIRC it didn't even have a proper table/grid control: you had to build your own, and when you start thinking about how rich a proper table/grid is, taking into account accessibility, keyboard shortcuts, picking up OS level settings (palette, scaling, etc.), making it behave like a table in any other application on Windows, I just couldn't be bothered building all that... so then it's back to third parties again.
I don't know what third party support for these frameworks is like nowadays but, fundamentally, for the sort of independent experiments I'm working on I don't want to either (i) fork over hundreds or thousands of dollars to third parties for (I think) basic functionality that (I think) should be available as part of the framework and should have been there since day one, or (ii) spend time wrangling the framework to implement this basic functionality because it isn't a core part of the problem I'm trying to solve or the value I'm trying to deliver.
I'd rather just use Qt or something, which at least has what I need.
Do you actually mean the DataGrid? Because the WinForms "DataGrid" was deprecated in 2002 with .NET 2.0 which added the DataGridView. The software I work on is Windows Forms and I can't say I've had any issues like you describe with the DataGridView. I was able to create a control derived from it that does all the heavy lifting for customizations(Visual, interaction, cell spanning, etc.), of which we had a lot. Enough that we were exploring third party controls, but found we would have to customize those ourselves anyway, so I just wrote my own control based on DataGridView to save us the licensing.
WPF had it's own DataGrid control from the start, though I can't comment from experience on it's versatility, I'd assume given WPF's nested-content approach it is surely at least more flexible than the DataGridView.
In any case that didn't really matter. In mid-2004, when I started, the company was still targeting .NET 1.0 for all apps because it meant we could guarantee customers would have that runtime installed on their machines without the need for another dependency. The business model was download -> try -> buy so we wanted as little friction as possible and having a newer version of .NET that might require another download and install wasn't worth the dropout rate we'd experience.
That being said, .NET 1.0 also meant we were using Visual Studio.NET 2002 which was... incredibly painful to work with. I'd come from the world of IntelliJ IDEA which had all manner of code navigation, inspection, refactoring, and testing functionality built in. Not to mention Java already had generics and a much better and more comprehensive framework class library and more mature OSS scene covering whatever was missing from that. .NET 1.0 and VS2002 had none of it and, I forget, was it that VS2002 had no extension model or was it just that ReSharper didn't support it? Either way it felt like stepping back into the mid 1990s and I wasn't happy.
Eventually, sometime in summer or autumn of 2005, I managed to persuade leadership that at least allowing us to use .NET 1.1 and Visual Studio.NET 2003 would be a good idea, and would enable us to use ReSharper, which at least brought us on par with IntelliJ IDEA circa 2003 or so. I can't remember but it might have been that .NET 1.1 had been rolled out over Windows Update or enough service packs for Windows 2000 or Windows XP that we deemed the likely loss of purchases to be negligible.
Our first products developed with .NET 2.0 we didn't start working on until the back half of 2006 and this was really only because we were developing products that plugged in to SQL Server Management Studio which, again IIRC (long time ago), was based on the Visual Studio 2005 shell and required .NET 2.0.
We were always lagging on .NET versions because we wanted to make sure someone could just download, install, and run our products without needing to do anything else.
FWIW I think your Rust + Qt route is fantastic. I've been using Rust + EGUI myself, but have Qt in mind for future projects.
Pure Win32 still works, and is the most efficient and consistent.
Interesting that you picked 2007 as the start of Windows' decline in this regard when WPF (from the same year) makes it so much easier to change the look without changing the behavior. I my eyes that toolkit does a lot of things right with controls that only define their behavior and not their visuals, which can easily be completely replaced (well, easier than writing a new Scrollbars from scratch).
This is the "man with two clocks" problem. Win32 is still there, it still works and it still produces scroll bars that work like they did before, but now you have so many other options you're permanently indecisive.
This is why I love GNOME. The community is doing a great job with creating GTK4 native applications. I'll often pick a GTK app over a more featured app, because they usually do enough. It's very satisfying to be able to use the same shortcuts in most applications.
This is why I like Delphi / C++Builder's theming. It's standard UI controls -- so you get stuff like the scrollbar menu Raymond mentions -- but you can make it look custom if you want. Same behaviour, different rendering.
GTK gets this right, and Qt does not.
pgup behaviour allows for intermediate speed when line-by-line is too slow, while dragging is imprecise
That's two actions, while clicking is only one.
For scroll ranges that aren’t overly long, you can long-press so that the area ends up scrolling to that position. Only for long scroll ranges is it necessary to drag, use the context menu, or the Shift key, for absolute positioning.
There are certainly trade-offs, but it’s not like there aren’t justified reasons for the way it is.
> and Qt does not.
Isn't that what middle click does in Qt?
1. You're editing text outside of Emacs. Your cursor remains where it was, so you insert a single character and the document scrolls back to the cursor. You can then delete that character.
2. You're editing text in Emacs. You like to pretend it's still the 1970s and off-screen cursors are some pie-in-the-sky fantasy. You solve the problem with some unspecified ELISP wizardry, which as a self-respecting Emacs user you are surely capable of.
3. You're reading a read-only document. You activate your full-text search, which every good document viewer has, and start typing the last sentence you read while it's still fresh in your memory.
Double hell no. The majority of the time it's a log file with lots of repetitive lines, and I'm definitely NOT going to remember exactly the line, especially after the disruption of accidentally jumping somewhere unexpected.
Click in the scroll bar to
(•) Jump to the next page
( ) Jump to the spot that's clicked
I've never found it of any use.
I just want normal OS-controlled scrollbars everywhere
widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled: false - always show normal scrollbar, don't just expand on hover
widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style: (it seems that values 1-5 are allowed)
widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override: width
Where do you remove the option for me to see how long your (now often AI generated) blog post is just by glancing at the scroll bar, why do you remove it. That’s really crappy UX…
Also - apps (mainly Office 365) no longer use a framework that allows the OS supported use of Accent Color (the thing that allows the active windows toolbar to get a Color that quickly and effectively signals ‘I’m the active one now). No no - I am Office I am so important that I need to always be green (Excel) or blue (Word) etc. No need for you to know if I am the active window or not - you’ll find out when starting to type and the ‘wrong’ windows receives your input!
It seems that there is a design pattern where product owners favor apps to look nice in board room presentations over making them effective to use for professional users (as well as average Joe).
Don’t get me started on the often lack of keyboard shortcuts - just use the mouse (no thanx - way too much clicking, only use mouse where it makes sense, please)…
Usability breaks the look of my design, so I'll break usability! Obviously it's more important that everyone sees my amazing graphic design skills, than that they can actually use it!
Usability is one thing, but with Apple hiding scrollbars by default, loads of macOS-designed websites spawn scrollbars all over the place on other platforms because of 1px overflows.
If I want a dozen different UI toolkits and three different settings apps in my day, Linux has that covered, with a lot more freedom and reliability.
The days when everything was WinForms were glorious.
Oh yeah, one more, BibleTime which is Qt: it’s fairly Windowsy, click is PageUp/PageDown, right click is context menu (Scroll here, ---, Top, Bottom, ---, Page up, Page down, ---, Scroll up, Scroll down), Shift+click is same as click, middle-click is scroll here.
(These sorts of things are also one reason why you shouldn’t implement your own scroll bars in web pages: different platforms behave differently, and you can’t match it all sanely or sometimes at all.)
Why do I care about matching it all? Do we need a scrollbar with all kinds of bespoke per-platform functionality? If I have a scrollbar, that people can use to scroll on all platforms, and it fits the visual aesthetic of my application instead of looking like an absolute dogshit eyesore, is that not good enough? What percentage of the population would you reckon is shift+clicking their scrollbars on a routine enough basis to notice a web-app that doesn't meet their expectations? 1%? 0.1%? 0.0001%? And in this fail case, when they shift+click the scrollbar and it doesn't behave as they expected, how much harm is really being caused? Will it ruin their day or will they maybe just go 'tch' and then use the scrollbar normally to achieve their scrolling needs like everyone else?
Apparently I have angered the scrollbar shift+clicking hordes. There might be dozens of you!
Your weird hatred/obsession with Apple is preventing you from understanding that my argument wasn't even in favor of Apple's default behavior, but about software that doesn't respect the preference chosen by the end user who changes that setting away from the default.
[0] i think Qt might have added it at some point but it has been several years since i used Windows as a main OS and bothered to check it
The frameworks that actually wrap a Win32 scrollbar are the ones doing it right; the ones that (badly) reinvent a scrollbar are the ones to avoid. The real problem in this case isn't frameworks, but how they make use of the platform capabilities.
Because it is impossible to change its color. It was/is not uncommon to see custom/dark skinned Windows apps with ugly gray scrollbars looking at you. Even today, only Light and Dark themes are supported, impossible to set a custom color.
"... Custom Draw, the feature found with many of the common controls shipped with Windows. Custom Draw allows an application to completely take over the drawing of a window’s scrollbars, and replace the scrollbar graphics with a completely user defined look."
https://www.catch22.net/tuts/win32/custom-scrollbars/
Not sure what (or when) Custom Draw was. It's not in my WIN32.HLP file.
In properly designed bars this is either a default or a configurable option. Moving your mouse to a far away bar and holding shift are more expensive actions than pressing PgDn (or a shortcut), so the action can't be just a page, it has to be something more valuable, harder to replicate (the even smaller arrows at the top/bottom are even worse)
That's a counter against another common sin of UI design that's stuck in the past, another superficially appealing idea that requires users hunting for tiny lines for common operations. That one should be fixed instead of making the scroll bar worse. (they even have that whole dedicated "windows" button that doesn't properly manage... windows)
Besides, lack of proper universal undo (that can undo selection/position changes, including windows) is yet another desktop UI design failure. Similarly to what you've noted, the solution to which is yet again fixing that instead of breaking useful functionality in other elements. So maybe it should be Win+Z to undo window resizing/moving?
A) Both hands on the keyboard, making it easy to reach both the Win key and the arrow keys at the same time to snap your windows.
or
B) One hand on the keyboard and one hand on the mouse, making window snapping instant with the mouse.
But I forgot that this is HN, so a significant proportion of readers also use their computers with both hands on the mouse, or no hands and one foot each for the keyboard and for the mouse.
Edit: Sorry for being sarcastic.
> A) Both hands on the keyboard, making it easy to reach both the Win key and the arrow keys at the same time to snap your windows.
It might be "easy" to reach arrow keys, but it's even easier and faster not having to do that
> B) making window snapping instant with the mouse
Your left window slightly overlaps the right one. You want to resize it by reducing its width by ~5% and its height by ~9% to avoid that Name your "instant" list of mouse actions to achieve that.
Then they can also jump back and forth effortlessly between two places in a document.
The only somewhat similar function I've seen is on Kindle when you jump between footnotes or chapters, and they provide a very convenient interface for jumping back, but buttons instead of scroll bars.
If you hold it down long enough it does do it in a single click.