| Date: | June 9, 2005 / year-entry #146 |
| Tags: | other |
| Orig Link: | https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050609-33/?p=35373 |
| Comments: | 44 |
| Summary: | A common reaction to my explanation of whether dragging a file will result in a move or copy was that there should be a setting that lets you change the algorithm by which Explorer decides whether you want to move or copy. There are a few reasons why this is a bad idea. First, if... |
A common reaction to my explanation of whether dragging a file will result in a move or copy was that there should be a setting that lets you change the algorithm by which Explorer decides whether you want to move or copy. There are a few reasons why this is a bad idea. First, if there were such a setting, then it removes some of the predictability from the user interface. One of the benefits of a common user interface is that once you learn it, you can apply the rules generally. But if each user could customize how drag/drop works, then the knowledge you developed with drag/drop wouldn't transfer to other people's machines. Some people view infinite customizability as a good thing. But each added bit of customizability increases the possibility that a particular combination of settings won't get tested as heavily as perhaps it should. ("What do you mean, this doesn't work if you have the notification icons set to hide after only 5 seconds, the taskbar's auto-hide delay customized to a value larger than 5 seconds, the taskbar buttons customized to a boldface font larger than 14pt, and drag/drop operations defaulting always to move? How could you have missed that combination in your testing? Surely you should have anticipated the interaction between an auto-hide delay longer than the notification auto-hide delay combined with a nondefault drag on a network with fewer than 50 machines!") Infinite customizability also means that you can't just sit down in front of somebody's machine and start using it. You first have to learn how they customized their menus, button clicks, default drag effects, and keyboard macros. "Oh, on this machine, you paste by shift-right-clicking. Sorry. On my machine, I use ctrl-alt-middle-click to paste." Imagine if everybody could easily customize the order of the clutch, brake, and gas pedals in their car to suit their fancy. There is also the branding element. Like the Mac, Windows tries to cultivate a specific "look" that makes people say, "Hey, this computer is running Windows; I know how to use it!" My DVD player and my car both show the manufacturer's logo when they are booting up. So too does Windows. Even if the "change the default drag/drop behavior" option passed "settings court" and was deemed worth the additional test cost, you still have the problem that it affects only Explorer. Other programs would continue to use the old algorithm, at least until you found their settings to change how they perform default drag/drop as well, if such a setting existed at all. Imagine the confusion if Windows Explorer followed one set of rules, but Microsoft Outlook followed a different set of rules. "Oh right, this is a mail message I'm dragging; the default operation is going to be a move, not a copy." |
Comments (44)
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"One of the benefits of a common user interface is that once you learn it, you can apply the rules generally"
Can you go have a chat with some people on the Visual Studio team?
It is starting to feel like they think its better to change everything with every release.
Steve, just because the entire company didn’t follow that argument everywhere doesn’t mean that it isn’t the right argument.
Gene: that’s why you can almost never type ‘vim’ or – even worse – ’emacs’ at someone else’s prompt. :-)
On the one hand being able to customize your machine is great. But on the other I can see how customizing it too much could be a bad thing. I understand what you mean about little settings could cause the users experience to be a sour one. I have coworkers that reverse their mouse buttons, and they also keep the Num Lock off ( which is the opposite of what I do). Just these two small changes make using their computers frustrating.
and who decides what is the right behavior? what if the default behavior is costing me time and productivity because I cannot make MY computer work the way that is best for me?
Since when is customization a system wide setting? If I change my taskbar to autohide it will change my taskbar only, not the taskbar settings of all users on my computer. If I change what drag and drop does by default under my account it will only affect my drag and dropping. So if someone else starts using my computer their account will have the defaults, which will be known and they can customize those to fit their needs without affecting my settings.
Jerry Pisk, there are some global settings, screen resolution for example.
The computer in front of which I sit here is my computer. I bought the components, put them together and installed two separate operating systems on it, all by myself. I have a user account for myself on this computer, protected by a password that no one but me and my brother knows. This user account is capable of storing settings that apply to me, and only to me.
There is a serious flaw to the argument about sitting down at somebody else’s computer. First, if it’s my computer that is customized, then I did the customizations myself (most likely). This means I’m aware of the defaults, and I’m further aware of the possibility of changing them. I know how to change them. And I probably know how to use the defaults.
So if I go to some other place, I expect the computer to use the defaults and behave accordingly. Usability problem? No. The usability is not degraded compared to a default Windows system, because it IS a default Windows system. The usability is not enhanced as it is on my own computer. However, going with the assumption that I do most of my work on my own computer, this ought to be rather irrelevant. As long as I’m capable of using the computer in question for whatever minor task I’m trying to accomplish, that’s sufficient.
Or is the the computer I’m guest at that’s modified? Then the question is why? Did I use somebody else’s account? Well, you’ve got your problem right there. Simple fact is, it’s your personal account and you shouldn’t let anybody else use it. If it’s a friend come over, you’re probably right there beside him and can help him through any problems he might have. If it’s a tech support guy, well, tough. I suppose a tech support guy should be capable of adapting to different settings, or temporarily restoring them to the defaults if necessary.
Or is the default setting, the guest account, modified? Uh, well, then the fault clearly lies with the system admin, who either made weird defaults (which is bad, and has nothing to do with customization) or did not prevent the users of the guest account from modifying the defaults.
Again, I see no reason not to give the basic capability for customization, as far as the OS is concerned.
The branding argument does not strike me as particularly interesting either. UI behaviour should not be part of the branding. The simple reason is that good UI behaviour is not noticed. Drag & Drop behaviour is noticed the moment it does something wrong, e.g. dropping your files in the playlist in an unexpected order, because of some weird concept of "active file" or whatever. This is the moment the user notices the UI, not earlier. And by this rule, an OS might be remembered as "Hey, that’s the thing that does this weird thing here, and doesn’t even let me change that behaviour." It won’t be remembered as "Cool, that’s the thing that did exactly what I expected." Because humans do not notice and even less remember the expected.
Leaving the testing argument, which is actually a good one. For some things. It comes down to robus code paths.
But it is, unfortunately, not an argument that you can present to end users.
"So, if the auto-hide delay is longer than 5 seconds but the taskbar larger than four lines, then setting the default drag behaviour to copy causes an integer overflow here because …"
Interaction bugs are some of the weirdest and hardest to track bugs ever. It always astounds me that games crash because a player orders the construction of a tank at the same moment his artillery fire hits the enemy’s defences, but only if there are exactly eight jets in the air. Yet these things happen. And unit testing is useless against it. Coding techniques help some. But large projects tend to have these problems regardless, the more often the more complicated the coding technique is. Mozilla is a true nightmare in this regard. Has anyone ever looked at the XML/HTML/XHTML copying code there? About six different code paths playing together to make copying of CDATA sections impossible.
But no end user is ever going to get this. Which makes the programmer’s look incompetent. It’s not a nice situation.
While not the point at all…
… the easiest solution is to drag & drop using the right mouse button. That way you get the option at the end :)
CornedBee, I don’t agree.
You’re saying that it’s OK if you’ve customized your computer and go to use someone elses’ because you know the defaults. The whole point is that the other person can customize their computers, too! When you go to someone else’s computer, you WON’T know how it works.
Further, the argument that everyone should use their own account is entirely bogus.
Me: Hey, let me copy this stuff to your PC and install it for you because it’s kind of complex.
You: Ok, let me create you a user account and we can get started.
Me: Uhh, no.
I can just see it now when I go over to someone else’s PC to help them debug a problem.
Me: "Oh, I see the issue in the code… let me drive and I’ll fix it".
You: "Ok, let me log out of this account and you can log in as yourself to fix it.
Aaagh, that whole argument that you should only ever use your own account makes me nauseous. And I’m certainly not going to go change the settings just for an hour or 2 of work–nobody wants to do that.
We have a highly customizable IDE for developing software where I work, and it’s an absolute nightmare trying to do any sort of development on someone else’s PC (yes, when we collaborate we switch off at the keyboard instead of logging out and logging back in as different users continuously.) if they’ve customized it. Based on experience, the consistency argument to me is a very practical argument. (I am actually one of the people who has customized the editor UI).
Finally, my company is careful to keep the look and feel of our products consistent, as I would imagine many companies are. I wouldn’t brush this point off so easily either.
Same here. I do right mouse-drag becouse I do not know will that result in new shortcut or copy/move. I have read you description about copy/move, but how about making shortcuts ? :) Especially regarding start menu etc.
As for customize – that is good thing a stable interface at least in basic operations – Ctrl+C/V/ins/del and mouse. If there ever whould be customization there also should be selection of UI settings profile with "standart" option included :)
Hmm… same for UI language actually…
My favorite example of this was a GDI/console bug that was never found (this was in the NT4/Win2K days).
I could reliably reproduce it on any machine, but only in a certain configuration.
You needed to have:
The tray set to auto-hide
A console window set to 9999 lines
The screen resolution set to 1024×768
The console window had to have the bottom frame of the console window touching the hidden tray
If you had that, and you did a DIR /S of your hard disk, horizontal lines would be painted across the console window.
The developers in Windows punted it to the display driver, until I came over to their office and reproduced it on a half a dozen machines. They were never able to reproduce it without me in the room though.
The bug’s still there in XP SP2, every once in a while (maybe once a year?), I can get it to reproduce, so clearly one of the myriad of fixes taken reduced the likelihood of the failure.
This is a perfect example of a "you needed 15 different things to go wrong to see the bug" problem.
Alot of people don’t realize you can right-click the object(s), drag/drop, and use the context menu to choose what you want to do. No guesswork, not much extra time used.
It’s not as if Explorer doesn’t tell you what it’s going to do: the cursor has an attached + sign for a copy, no additional indicator for a move, and the curly-arrow-in-a-box for creating a shortcut. By the way, Alt works for create-shortcut as well as Ctrl+Shift.
Of course Raymond knows a lot about the hidden settings – didn’t you recently admit to being the author of TweakUI? A priority for Longhorn must be making the shortcut overlay on the mouse pointer be the same as the user’s selected shortcut overlay ;-) <joking>. I use the ‘light arrow’ overlay, I’ve always found the default too bold and distracting.
I agree with cornedbee.
Whats wrong with having a dropdown box in the display preperties window which lets you set everything back to default if required for a short period.
somthing along the lines of the current ‘themes’ options.
Just curious: Your car shows a logo when it boots? What kind of car is that?
The one thing that is not mentioned here is that Drag & Drop does do different things in Explorer depending on something else. If I drag a file from a folder to another folder on the same drive, it moves… If the drag is to a different drive it copies. Now, where is the consistency in that???
That’s because a move on the same drive is a "move" operation – just change a pointer in the file allocation table.
On the other hand a move between drives is a "copy/delete" operation… all the bits of the file need to be copied to the new drive, then the original file needs to be unlinked.
Not saying it couldn’t be changed. It used to be dragging/dropping .exe’s created a shortcut, and that was changed.
Windows has tons of settings that vastly change its behavior; auto-hide taskbar comes to mind as one that easily confused people are easily confused about. I don’t buy the argument.
The second point is an excellent one, IMO. Regardless, *not* customizing things to death is the right decision; this just isn’t the right argument. I’m not sure what the right argument is, but hey, I’m just a Monday morning quarterback. :-)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but Outlook does follow a different set of rules. Dragging and dropping in Outlook always results in a move. Even if the source and destination are in different message stores (analogous to different disks in Explorer).
Explorer on the other hand will copy if the source and destination are on different disks.
Maurits and Good Point.
Re exe, they still do if the are in AppPaths.
Re Reasons, See raymonds first link. It’s not directory entries at all.
I still reckon the best OS for home users is Win CE, precisely because it’s not customisable. It needs to be released on desktops and just do resumes (Word Processing), email, web browsing, photos, and music.
With cheap hardware (due to lower system requirements) it allows one computer per person. So multi user features are unimportant. Advanced networking features (ICS) can be put out to external routers like many do now.
Your customers will be estatic. A computer that works. That does what they want to do (my niece and my sister only use MSN Messenger, MSN/Hotmail/Yahoo type mail, and browse the web.
Games could be added like as a XBox (for niece but not sister).
and a OS that doesn’t try to be all things to all people
<<Just curious: Your car shows a logo when it boots? What kind of car is that? >>
I’m guessing Raymond is a proud owner of a Toyota Prius.
You’re wrong.
Dragging from a public folder to another public folder is a copy, for example.
"If it’s a tech support guy, well, tough. I suppose a tech support guy should be capable of adapting to different settings, or temporarily restoring them to the defaults if necessary."
Well, that’s one theory.
(For background, my day-job is outsourced IT provision. I’m mostly Servers & Networks, but our customers are mostly SMEs who won’t pay for a help-desk, so we generally end up handling desktop issues also. My personal fief, if you will, is eighteen companies with around sixty machines each – so, about 1100 desktops that are solely mine to support in my spare time from running the servers. And most of them have sufficient legacy apps and legacy bad habits that we can’t lock them down nearly as well as we might like, so people break them a *lot*.)
In this environment, we don’t have time to monkey about with extensively customised settings. If they’re altered to the point that they’re making the machine hard to use for us – and if you’re reading this, Miss White Cursive Text On A Magenta Background, I’m talking about *you* – that user’s user profile gets blown away right off the bat. Redo from start.
Supportwise, it’s not practical or cost-effective to deal with extensive user customisation.
Microsoft provides a download for users who want to position the keyboard’s Ctrl key where it always used to be on traditional computer keyboards, and who want to position the keyboard’s Caps Lock key on the key that now says Ctrl. If I help my boss with a problem, and out of habit I select a string of text and hit Ctrl-C, I’ve just damaged his document instead of copying from it. But my boss is the primary user of his computer and he learned to touch-type decades before PC keyboards became common, so why shouldn’t he be allowed this customization?
Users of Tweak UI might also wonder how many fights there have been between the author of Tweak UI and the author of the base note in this thread ^u~
Thursday, June 09, 2005 12:00 PM by Simon Cooke
> … the easiest solution is to drag & drop
> using the right mouse button. That way you
> get the option at the end :)
That’s the easiest solution for intended drags and drops, sure. It doesn’t do a bit to solve something that happened around two days ago, when I intended to just move the mouse, but my finger bounced on the left button so Windows Explorer obediently moved a directory inside another directory. I couldn’t even guess which target directory the thing had got hidden into. Fortunately Windows Explorer now has an Undo command and it worked. But I want to customize left-button drag-and-drop to be off, disabled, no-op. Or at least the same menu that right-button drag-and-drop gives.
We need to be able to take our preferences with us on a memory stick. Plug in a memory stick to a computer, hit a button, and instantly create a temporary session for your user. Everything from Mouse speed to what initials to use in a Word document. Or better yet, put your preferences on the Internet and use a service to pull them wherever you go (I do this with my Firefox Bookmarks).
I have a bunch of AutoHotKey scripts that I am working on that I plan to compile to an EXE, copy to a memory stick, create an AutoRun (unless AutoRun on memory sticks is disabled on memory sticks for security reasons), and take with me. That way I can use my numerous hot-keys wherever I go (Windows+` for CMD.EXE being my favorite).
Today, my co-worker sat down at my computer to do some quick debugging in Textpad. Textpad is *extremely* customizable. If you want, you can reassign +every+ _single_ -ctrl key-. And more. I’ve only messed with the defaults that are unusual to me. In this case, he hit F5 to search for something, and it did the auto-next search (searches for either whatever’s highlighted or whatever you searched for last) because I’d changed it to the normal ctrl+f.
I was there to tell him the change, but I could definitely see how I could potentially change the program to the point that nobody else could use it. While this may be fine on a computer that only I use, how many windows installations take place on a corporate machine that potentially everybody could end up using at one point or another? When there is excessive customization, it gets very difficult to lock it down in such environments, especially since if the feature’s used at home, I’m more likely to find a back door to allow me to do it at work.
"once you learn it, you can apply the rules generally"
You should see how confused people get when they try and use my left handed mouse. Sometimes I have to tell them several times a ‘session’. And these are supposedly intelligent people.
indiv, CornedBee already covered that. As he/she said, the problem is that the user preferences should follow the user around. Your only problem is if two people are trying to use the same computer at one time, but I say let ’em fight over the keyboard and the one that bleeds less wins.
Maurits, most users have no clue about how a FS is organised, and could care less. It used to be that cassette recorders (ok, I’m showing my age ;-) required you to press the play & record buttons to record. Huh? Why? Because the tape needed to be moving. Of course, as a user I really shouldn’t have to worry about it – press record, it records.
edwin, if his car shows a logo when it boots then my guess is his car is Grand Theft Auto.
"It used to be that cassette recorders required you to press the play & record buttons to record. Huh? Why? Because the tape needed to be moving. Of course, as a user I really shouldn’t have to worry about it – press record, it records."
This is not a bug but a feature and many modern stereos still require you to press two buttons to record. Recording is a destructive operation and if you have to press two buttons you’re less likely to do it accidently.
I don’t understand the "because the tape had to be moving" argument.
In my experience, you have to:
1. HOLD DOWN record
2. PRESS play
3. RELEASE both
for it to work… so the tape doesn’t start moving until the record option is committed.
I thought the reasons for it were:
1) as mentioned, recording is a destructive operation and you need an "are you sure" equivalent
2) the buttons on a recording device (VCR, tape recorder, whatever) are sometimes finicky and require various levels of pressure to activate depending on the device. If the recording needs to start very close to a particular time (like if you’re editing some cuts onto a mix) then the time it takes the finger to adjust the pressure to the device can be a factor. So the user can press Record ahead of time by a few seconds, getting a feel for the device – and then press Play at "just the right time".
Explorer does not decide its default drag and drop operation based on source and target drives – it does it based on drive letters. If you mount a drive to a folder (I for example have Documents and Settings as mounted drive) drag and dropping to the parent drive will result in move (and WITHOUT progress window even though the bytes are being copied which takes some time), not in a copy.
And don’t BMW’s cars display a logo too on their iDrive screen?
And I am going to make an argument for unlimited customizability – it forces the developers not to take things for granted. If you don’t allow users to customize then your developers develop a "that will never happen so we don’t need to worry about that" mindset which will only introduce bugs into your application. If you let users customize everything then they need to sit down and think about the proper behavior in all situations – which btw is not an infinite number, there are limits on both ends, for example once you go below or over a certain font size you don’t need to worry about how your widget is going to display, it will simply show up in an error state.
Has anyone noticed a proliferation of shortcuts in the same directory as the original file?
On my network at work, users accidentally create shortcuts in the same directory as the original file all the time. These little shortcuts are everywhere. I think they’re doing something weird when they double-click to open files, or dragging slightly when they click.
As I understand it, the only two ways of creating a shortcut from the mouse are by ctrl+shift + drag-and-release, or by right-drag and then release while "Create Shortcut" is selected. Neither one seems like high-probability accidental behaviour, yet these unintentional shortcuts are everywhere.
The gardener in me wants to delete every single one of these shortcutss since obviously no-one really uses them …
"We need to be able to take our preferences with us on a memory stick." Someone is working on that: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1040_22-5736039.html.
Left-button drag and drop (primary-button drag-and-drop, of course; which button, left or right, is primary is customizable!) OUGHT to move stuff-regardless of whether it’s an EXE or whether it’s on the same disk or not.
And does the concept of "same disk" where things are moved and not copied, mean the same physical disk partition, even if it has a different drive letter assigned (like with SUBST, or mapped to different sub-directories on the same physical network drive)?
Not being able to move EXE files with the left mouse button, when I knew what I was doing, really bothered me for the longest time. Yes, I know the little icons are there (but I think they weren’t there in Windows 95).
It’s too late to worry about it now. There are other more important things.
You mean there’s no special key in Windows that toggles it to its default factory behaviour so that you can use anyone’s PC even if they have customised everything in it?
here’s a simple question related to explorer drag/drop:
I’m a DropSource and the user is dragging items to explorer. how can i found out where they dragged them to?
the items the user is dragging aren’t files (yet) they’re just virtual representations of files. when the user drags the items out of my application i want to start a long-running process that wil eventually create the files in the location he specified.
the only way i can find to do this is to create a uniquely-named folder in the temp directory, and use an ICopyHook to cancel explorer’s SHFileOperation and notify my app of the location of the copy.
there /has/ to be a better way to do such a simple thing, doesn’t there?
Yes there is a better way (file group descriptor) but discussing it here would be a thread hijack. Ask your question in the suggestion box.
<i>Even if the "change the default drag/drop behavior" option passed "settings court" and was deemed worth the additional test cost, you still have the problem that it affects only Explorer. Other programs would continue to use the old algorithm, at least until you found their settings to change how they perform default drag/drop as well, if such a setting existed at all. Imagine the confusion if Windows Explorer followed one set of rules, but Microsoft Outlook followed a different set of rules. "Oh right, this is a mail message I’m dragging; the default operation is going to be a move, not a copy."</i>
Ok this is a secondary issue, this is a side effect of having a poor framework that applications built on. If you change how dnd is handled in one app, it should change everywhere.
"Imagine the confusion if Windows Explorer followed one set of rules, but Microsoft Outlook followed a different set of rules."
Or imagine the confusion if Word and Excel used different sets of rules for how copy and paste work. Oh, wait…
"Dragging from a public folder to another public folder is a copy, for example."
So dragging between two non-public folders is a move. Between public folders is a copy. From public to non-public is what? From non-public to public is?
And Explorer depends on the drive (logical drive, not physical).
Luckily they all behave the same way to minimize confusion.
Or confuse you in the same way so you start thinking that this is the way the things should work.
But Outlook does already follow a different set of rules – sort of. If you drag a file between two file stores (disks) in Explorer, it gets copied. If you drag a file between two file stores in Outlook (say from an Exchange folder to a personal folder), it gets moved.