They should first fix their search. The new settings are overwhelming and I end up having so many clicks when I need something like adding Hyper-V or add a Bluetooth device.
Then, there’s the Windows search. If you ever tried using Settings and search. Most of the time you end up getting Edge opened with an outdated link or unhelpful Bing search.
I just hope they won’t axe it until figuring out how they make decent settings.
Ironically, the same company showed how to perfectly execute a settings page in Visual Studio Code: It's searchable, has a consistent and intuitive grouping, a simple way to get help for each individual setting and an import/export functionality. But I suppose, it's from a different department...
It also requires manual JSON for many things, which are also not searchable, nor assistive-tool friendly because it relies on individually navigating through a tree of autocomplete rather than viewing them all on a single page...
vscode's settings are easily my least favorite modern pattern, and I am flabbergasted that it's spreading to other tools. The "it's one big scrollable list with a sidebar nav" is great in some ways, but everything else about it is downright awful.
JSON(5, with comments) as a config storage format? And optional editing UI? Oh heck yes, that's perfectly reasonable.
Requiring manual JSON editing, even with fancy autocomplete? Hell no. Turn that into a UI with the same info you show in the autocomplete. Obviously. WTF VSCode. WTF every tool that has copied this. This is not even slightly acceptable.
I liked that part, but I'm fully with you that many UX decisions in VS code are completely inscrutable. Such as building an entire UI toolkit without any ability to show dialogs - and then requiring plugin authors to awkwardly work around this limitation by abusing the quick navigation and autocomplete functionalities - and if that doesn't work, have the users manually edit json files...
I still don't know how to switch to the JSON-only view the few times that I need it.
And I hate that quite a few extensions have a vague "just set X in settings" in their README's where X doesn't show up in the auto generated UI, and is called something else in JSON
Like tredre3 said there's also a button on the top right corner of settings, but I tend to prefer to start directly into json mode through the command palette.
Being able to find any sort of action with the palette just by typing is hands down the best UI design I've experienced in software. It's not new, Unity had it in the older Ubuntu distributions, but it's unfortunately not seen often enough and Ubuntu lost it when they moved to Gnome.
The palette search box also has the smart design of placing to the top functions you use the most through the palette, so if you open the json settings a few times it'll pop up at the top before you even finish typing the word "settings".
After a while, your interactions with the palette make its UI feel very personalized to your needs.
But I've never used a sophisticated application that does most of its config via registry editing. It's for extreme edge cases only, where it's basically fine - it's a worse about:config, but it serves the same purpose, you only go in there when you already know what you need to do.
vscode, in contrast, puts common things into hand-edited-json-only config. I don't think I've ever had a vscode project that didn't require json changes to work correctly. That's ridiculous.
> It's searchable, has a consistent and intuitive grouping, a simple way to get help for each individual setting and an import/export functionality.
IIRC, Eclipse had all of that (or maybe all that except for import/export?) five+ years prior to VS Code's first public release.
And given that "Do a substring search through this huge-ass mess of options and switches and winnow down to the matches" is such a blindingly obvious thing to add in when you get so very many options in your configuration GUI, I'd be shocked if there weren't several things that predate Eclipse that did that, too.
The new menu would actually be quite ok if you could configure what’s on the main menu and what’s on “More”. The old menu has a ton of stuff I never use so in theory it would be nice to push that to a secondary menu. But the UX geniuses have decided it’s better to have random stuff I never use in the shorter first menu and the stuff I really need is on the second. It would be so easy to configure this. What are these geniuses thinking? (I guess they don’t think much….)
Putting the things I use the most closest to my mouse. It's great. I spent two seconds figuring out the icons the first time I encountered it and now it's faster for me.
Did you mean to add the bingsearchdisabled twice to work around some issue where it persists like a virus, or was that a typo for E.G. the computer rather than the user?
No I messed up somewhere. I remember I did have 3 regedits at one time (in this part of the decrapify list). The count was right so I didn't pay attention.
Usually, I have no particular nostalgia for old designs—everyone praises Windows 3.1 but to me it's just eye-searing. But, even I can't stand the new search. A nontrivial amount of the time—and on two different machines IIRC—I'll open the search menu and type something, but my keystrokes just don't register. I have to close and reopen the start menu. And, actually opening the start menu takes a noticeably long time. I don't know if it's doing some last-minute indexing or something, but it's very annoying.
And the same is true for the settings app. I never really use the Control Panel–specific settings, and whitespace doesn't bother me, so I'm not inherently opposed to the new app. But the execution just feels subpar somehow—if I had to guess, it's probably the latency whenever you click anything.
(macOS also has all kinds of weird UI bugs too, e.g. the Bluetooth and sound dropdowns in the top menubar are very finicky for me. And System Preferences proper isn't much better. It drives me crazy....)
> everyone praises Windows 3.1 but to me it's just eye-searing
Windows 3.1 is better than earlier Windows, but I haven't seen a claim that it's better than Win95?
I don't really think 3.1 is eye-searing, but I think the basic design is pulled forward from 3.0 which ran on mostly any video card, but feels designed around 16 colors. Wikipedia says 3.1 requires vga, but they didn't make things pretty by default until 95.
In hindsight, I think I mixed up 3.1 and 95 (they’re both before my time). So I guess my actual controversial opinion is that I’m very glad UIs don’t look like Windows 95 anymore :-P
Of course, all this is a matter of personal preference—I just think that nostalgia plays an underappreciated role in these discussions.
The whole point of search is to send you to Edge. They have no motivation to fix search, only to push more of their products. If you want a better life, abandon ship.
My main dev machine is macOS for better and worse. But since we do cross platform and target Windows. I ended up getting a proper Windows machine following Apple silicon transition.
Linux is less being used by our customers and for my job less useful / WSL or Mac VM is enough.
I wish they would just integrate Everything. It works fast, has an intuitive UI, and doesn't have any of the wacky search/sort bugs that stock Explorer has.
Then, there’s the Windows search. If you ever tried using Settings and search. Most of the time you end up getting Edge opened with an outdated link or unhelpful Bing search.
I just hope they won’t axe it until figuring out how they make decent settings.