Windows 10 Tech Preview First Impressions
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you can change to "tablet mode" by going to the Start Menu Properties and unchecking "use start menu". In case you want to see what the Start Screen looks like
This is just reenabling the 8.1 start screen. Not the full-screen start menu that's in the workflow testing video shown in the presentation. The full-screen start menu still keeps the menu part on the left and just expands out the pinned tiles part
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with crappy completion.
Just curious, what do you think/find wrong with the completion?
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No list of possible choices, doesn't work for some possible commands, no custom interface for commands to add their own stuff (as far as i know).
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If, as every sane person, you have them all maximized and just Alt+Tab between them, then it's really a non-issue. And way easier than remembering "shit, on which desktop did I put that window now?".
How is that a non-issue? How is having to TAB through 20 different things isn't making it any better?
What kind of "management" are you doing exactly? Windows just kind of ... sit there ... when you're not actively using them.
Are you like organizing them into window phalanxes and having little virtual screen space battles between your Microsoft Office windows and your Chrome windows? And you make little army noises with your mouth while you drag them around? Is that what you're doing? Because seriously, man: YouTube superstardom right there.
Yes, the windows...just...sit...there. Until I decide I need to do stuff with a particular window and I'm forced into a game of hide and seek.
Due to the nature of my work I end up doing several things at once, having to rapidly switch between them. This is what virtual desktops are perfect for.
I can have a workspace dedicated to programming and related stuff, another one for comms like Skype and email, and another one so I can read @blakeyrat complaining about stuff in an entertainingly vile fashion.
PS: Wroom wroom.
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Until I decide I need to do stuff with a particular window and I'm forced into a game of hide and seek.
Are you using an OS with no task bar? Why would you have to hide and seek?
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Are you using an OS with no task bar? Why would you have to hide and seek?
Because all the damn windows are just sitting there. In a single taskbar. How am I supposed to tell the difference between the Firefox where JIRA is and the Firefox where random entertaining internet stuff is?
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Just curious, what do you think/find wrong with the completion?
For a while my attitude was that it was just different (and not better or worse overall) than sh-style tab completion, being better (than sh-style tab-completion) at some things and worse at others. But after using it I think it's actually concretely worse. In addition to the lack of showing possible choices without cycling through them, the big problem I have with it is that in sh I feel like I can hit tab without knowing exactly what will happen, and it will never make things harder to type; that's not true with cmd's.If there are multiple completions available, sh just gives you a prefix and then you can keep typing. Except for the tab press(es) itself, you're not worse than if you didn't have tab completion. Under cmd, if there's a long & incorrect completion candidate you don't realize is available, and it gives it to you, you have two choices. First, you can either keep hitting tab and hope you get to what you want someday. But how many tab presses will it take? Who knows. It's unbounded, because it depends on the number of completions (while the number of completion attempts with sh depends on the length of the name of the thing you're completing) which can be both larger and harder to know in advance. And if you have more than a couple presses to get to your target, it's really easy to pass it. If you do pass it, or decide to not even try, you have the second option which is to delete the suffix the autocompletion added that you don't like, but that can easily be a dozen or more (occasionally many more!) characters.
To summarize, I think I (without knowing it in advance) hit on the key difference: tab in sh is bounded by the length of the name and depends less on the completion candidates that are available in terms of how predictable what it will do is.
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the number of completion attempts with sh depends on the length of the name of the thing you're completing
I'm not quite sure I get what this means. Does tab go through them ordered by the length of the string (shortest through to longest, or vice versa)?
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How am I supposed to tell the difference between the Firefox where JIRA is and the Firefox where random entertaining internet stuff is?
By switching to IE, which will give you a separate preview for each tab, of course.
More seriously if you had two different FF windows instead of two tabs in one window you'd be able to tell. I realize this might not scale.
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And if you have more than a couple presses to get to your target, it's really easy to pass it.
Did you know you can shift-tab to go backwards?
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More seriously if you had two different FF windows instead of two tabs in one window you'd be able to tell. I realize this might not scale.
Yes, that's what I'm doing. The problem is that on the taskbar it has the exact same icon so I have to use the preview to distinguish them. Yes, I know this sounds like a miniscule problem but trust me, it adds up.
When I used to work on Linux and used its virtual desktops I would always know that Ctrl + Alt + Left Arrow is work stuff, Ctrl + Alt + Right Arrow is fun stuff. That way I could immediately switch between one and the other without having to manage the task bar.
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I'm not quite sure I get what this means. Does tab go through them ordered by the length of the string (shortest through to longest, or vice versa)?
No. It means it never guesses. For example, suppose you have files "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA", "AAAB", and "AAAC".If you type
A<tab>(don't care to look up the "key" markup), then:shwill determine those three files are completion candidates. It finds the longest common prefix of them, which isAAA, and will complete it to that point. It will be up to you to finish withAAAAAAAAAAA,B, orC(perhaps by additional tab presses, of course).- How many times will you need to press tab? At most once per letter in the thing you're trying to type. (Or twice if you want to see a list of completions.) That happens if none of the completions help.
cmdwill pick the first match (maybe arbitrary, maybe alphabetical, maybe something else; I forget/don't know) and complete toAAAAAAAAAAA. If you don't like that (because you're going forAAAC, you either have to hold backspace until it deletesAAAAAAAAAor press tab again some unknown number of times.- How many times? Depends on the number of completions, which is potentially exponentially larger than the length of what you're trying to type. In practice it rarely is, but then you also rarely hit the worst case scenario above, and it can often be an annoying number of them.
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I remember early in the Windows 7 days, FF had an experimental switch for previews (which, being extremely buggy, was the tipping point to me dropping FF). Is the switch still there, or has it been dropped too now?
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Did you know you can shift-tab to go backwards?
I actually didn't; that helps a lot, but I also don't think it would be enough to narrow the gap.
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Is the switch still there, or has it been dropped too now?
No idea; I avoid using FF whenever possible. I've hated Netscape since beta 0.999 or so; I only used Mozilla and later FF during the period when IE stagnated. As soon as Chrome came along I switched.
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I actually didn't; that helps a lot, but I also don't think it would be enough to narrow the gap.
Honestly I didn't expect it would, but I figured it'd make your life a little easier.
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Hmm, ok. I really think that's down to preference, and would argue that for the worst case - when you don't know exactly what you're looking for (but know the first letter or two), which turns out to be at the end of the completion cycle - the cmd method requires one less tab press because it doesn't autocomplete to the longest common prefix first. In fact, even in the case where you have just two files with the same first letter and common prefix (say, AAAB and AAAC) and you want the first result (ie. AAAB), you'd have to press tab twice in sh, but only once in cmd.
Like I said though, I think whether sh or cmd has better completion comes down to personal preference.
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How is that a non-issue? How is having to TAB through 20 different things isn't making it any better?
How's cycling through 20 desktops solving it?
How am I supposed to tell the difference between the Firefox where JIRA is and the Firefox where random entertaining internet stuff is?
Mouse over button, see all your Firefox windows with titles and miniatures. Unless you're still on XP, or some other system which hasn't figured that out...
Under cmd, if there's a long & incorrect completion candidate you don't realize is available (...)
Yes, cmd is utterly shit as an interface. Also, Notepad is not really a good text editor. Way to discover America.
Honestly, they should keep the subsystem, but scrap the interface entirely - except it probably doesn't calculate well, because most of the time you see the console it's not at the command prompt anyway.
When I used to work on Linux and used its virtual desktops I would always know that Ctrl + Alt + Left Arrow is work stuff, Ctrl + Alt + Right Arrow is fun stuff. That way I could immediately switch between one and the other without having to manage the task bar.
Good for you, I guess. I have my "fun stuff" in a separate damn VM (since I don't want to a) clutter the company laptop with things like VLC, and b) get distracted when I take it to work), and the two still get mixed up.
And you can still Alt-Tab between windows, with previews, mouse support, and everything.
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I'm working on a functional automation project that takes Eclipse, a VM, and a handful of browser windows.
I'm also working on some documentation and standards/guidelines tasks, which requires a bunch of Word documents and some browser tabs.
I'm also working on some testing data setup, which requires Eclipse, SQL Server Management Studio, a VM, and some browser tabs.
My machine can easily run all these things at once, but it'd be easier to organize them by task into desktops so I can just swap to the things I need for a given task in one go instead of hunting for them. That way when I hit a block for some task, I can fire off an email and swap to another task while I wait. At the moment I end up closing everything but the task I'm working on and having to re-open things as I get stuck and want to switch tasks.
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I really think that's down to preference, and would argue that for the worst case - when you don't know exactly what you're looking for (but know the first letter or two), which turns out to be at the end of the completion cycle - the cmd method requires one less tab press because it doesn't autocomplete to the longest common prefix first.
And I think you're wrong. In fact, at an impractical level, I am nearly certain that I could prove that, in most situations (that is, "I want this file and these files are present")cmdwill take more key presses. (It might take a few characters of length to get to that point, but I doubt it's more than four or five.) And that's an optimal number of presses --sh's increased predictability would increase the benefit even more.Proving that's true in practice would be a lot harder (not impossible if you instrument a shell to collect that information, but I'm not going to do it), but I suspect that statement carries through, just to a less extreme extent.
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How's cycling through 20 desktops solving it?
How did you arrive to the conclusion that I was going to be using 20 desktops?
What about 2 desktops with 10 windows each?
Or 3 with 7 + 7 + 6 ?
Or 4 with 5 + 5?
Or any other combination that does [b]not[/b] involve 20 desktops?
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cmd will take more key presses
Not if you have to look up how to do it in the alternatives. ;) A lot of people have learned
cmdsyntax and operations over the years; if they type at any speed, the number of key presses will be close on the most irrelevant thing in this whole topic…
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What about 2 desktops with 10 windows each?
So you have to cycle to the desktop, then cycle to the window. Well, to each his own, I guess...
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Good for you, I guess. I have my "fun stuff" in a separate damn VM (since I don't want to a) clutter the company laptop with things like VLC, and b) get distracted when I take it to work), and the two still get mixed up.
Congratulations, you just invented an extremely inefficient method for simulating virtual desktops!
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How did you arrive to the conclusion that I was going to be using 20 desktops?
Leave @Maciejasjmj to attack that strawman in peace; he'll have it slaughtered and taught a jolly good lesson in no time at all…
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if they type at any speed, the number of key presses will be close on the most irrelevant thing in this whole topic…
Then why are you using tab completion?
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Congratulations, you just invented an extremely ineffective method for simulating virtual desktops!
It's not so much "virtual desktops" rather than "I want to be able to purge my private stuff from the computer in 5 minutes if the company demands it back".
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So you have to cycle to the desktop, then cycle to the window. Well, to each his own, I guess...
But as I explained above I will have taken the time to categorize the window on each desktop appropriately. I'm not just going to randomly dump them wherever the hell I just feel like it.
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Then why are you using tab completion?
Me? You've not explained the part where I'm using Windows at all yet…
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I guess I've just never found
cmd's tab completion lacking (not in recent memory anyway...XP days might be a different story). I generally have a good idea of what file/folder I'm looking for that tab completing gets there quickly, and in the event that I don't I either do adirfirst if I know the parent directory, or browse to the folder in Explorer and open cmd straight from there if I'm really not sure of it's location (File->Open command promptis built-in functionality in Windows 8, and in previous editions there was usually some power users toolkit that would give that function in the right-click context menu)
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It's not so much "virtual desktops" rather than "I want to be able to purge my private stuff from the computer in 5 minutes if the company demands it back".
Who said I have been installing private stuff on my work PC? I said [b]Firefox[/b], please stop putting words in my mouth.
Or do you suggest I go set up a VM just so I can browse TDWTF within it?
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Who said I have been installing private stuff on my work PC? I said Firefox, please stop putting words in my mouth.
Maciejasjmj:
Good for you, I guess. I have my "fun stuff" in a separate damn VM (since I don't want to a) clutter the company laptop with things like VLC, and b) get distracted when I take it to work), and the two still get mixed up.Congratulations, you just invented an extremely inefficient method for simulating virtual desktops!
You were pointing me out.
Anyway, if you can arrange 20 windows nicely across three or so desktops at the beginning of the day, and have them in the same place at the end, you have my utmost admiration.
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AltTab?
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I've got 99 desktops but porn ain't on one
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AltTab?
Do you never close your windows, open new windows, pull out a tab from Chrome/FF so that you can look at two websites side by side?
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Rarely, rarely, oh and rarely.
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How am I supposed to tell the difference between the Firefox where JIRA is and the Firefox where random entertaining internet stuff is?
Hover your mouse over the Firefox icon for a half-second, then click on the preview that looks like Jira?
Maybe my mistake is assuming Firefox has been patched to support features in Vista...
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I guess I've just never found cmd's tab completion lacking
Blub blub blub. One of the nice things about bash's tab completion is that it's not just for the file system. It's more like intellisense. It will autocomplete options for you. Very context aware. Cmd's cycling through files is insulting in comparison.
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If you have arguments/parameters that are more complex than single letter switches, then I can see how that's more useful (and IIRC, Powershell is more like this. I really should start learning it more...).
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But it's not just switches. Though the switches are easier to use when they're verbose. It's also the arguments that go along with them. For instance, a version control command might be aware of which files have been modified. Make or ant targets are autocompleted.
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Maybe my mistake is assuming Firefox has been patched to support features in Vista...
Those thumbnails are something Windows does, not the app. (IIRC unless you deliberately do so.)
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Well yeah, I figured that (that's why I said "arguments/parameters that more complex than single letter switches").
The main thing I do semi-frequently in command prompt that this would be really suitable for is having to specify a particular interface foripconfig. Currently, I'd have toipconfig /allto find what names there are, then type out the interface's name (enclosed in quotes if it has spaces). I'd imagine if I typedeththen tabbed, autocomplete would be able to just cycle between all the interfaces that started witheth
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Yes, but to expose previews for tabs within a window, it's up to the application. FF used to have experimental support for this, but it was buggy as hell.
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but to expose previews for tabs within a window
Which is why I originally suggested using different windows.
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The other workaround is to use IE (9+)
Also, Chrome has apparently had experimental support for Aero Peek for tabs via a command line argument since 2010 or so.
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Minor pedantry: the thing yall are referring to as ‘bash-style autocompletion’ is actually GNU Readline. It's not just for shells – most, if not all, open source interactive programming environments include support for either readline or a compatibly-licensed clone.
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The other workaround is to use IE (9+)
I believe I suggested that, too, in the same post.
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Whuh?
Firefox has support for tabs thumbnails, just disabled by default. (Options -> Tabs -> Show tab previews in the windows taskbar)
It's a nice feature, as long as you don't try to close the tabs via the thumbnails.That's Windows' fault, though - it has terrible usability for closing multiple thumbnails: the thumbnails keep jerking around as you delete each one of them, requiring you to move your mouse an unpredictable amount each time to compensate.
And even if you have so many tabs (or windows) open that Windows displays a list instead of thumbnails, closing multiple tabs via the list is still terrible - the list stays stable allowing you to delete multiple tabs quickly, but if you take advantage of this and click too fast, it will switch to one of the tabs instead of closing it.Or maybe you're talking about something else and I can't be bothered to double-check since that doesn't involve ranting.
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Minor pedantry: the thing yall are referring to as ‘bash-style autocompletion’ is actually GNU Readline. It's not just for shells – most, if not all, open source interactive programming environments include support for either readline or a compatibly-licensed clone.
Readline is the library the shell uses to provide completion support; readline doesn't automagically give completion (just an API to do it). I think it's quite fair to put most of the credit on the shell even if you view them as separate.
