Comment by xp84
14 hours ago
> I use lots
Oh really? I, sadly, use nearly none. Open on my desktop right now: Slack, Outlook, Zoom, Windows Terminal, Edge, Claude, Obsidian, whatever the Windows image viewer is called, Cursor, and VS Code.
Only the last 2 have menu bars. And I can’t be certain that I didn’t dig through the preferences of one or both of them when I first installed them to tell them to knock off the bullshit and give me back the menus. Once in a while, there is an option buried somewhere like that.
In fairness I did not do a full inventory of all the apps I use. I see Word and VS Code. It may be less than I thought if I inventoried every app I regularly use.
I see some have gone the “browser” direction with tabs folded into the title bar and the menu bar dropped. Windows Terminal, File Explorer, and Notepad are all that style now.
Edit: Actually Notepad has the tabs in the titlebar thing but retained the menu bar and folded it into the command bar.
I personally am pretty disgusted by ‘tabs in the title bar’ since really what that means is deleting the title bar. You can’t grab and move the freaking window because most of it is made out of a bunch of tabs or other widgets. I presume this is done because somebody’s research found that many people just do everything in maximized windows or the Apple “full screen mode.” As long as you don’t mind sacrificing the people who do use window managers to manage windows, likely the most sophisticated users, this seems like a great move. But I would argue it’s still stupid because I have plenty of screen real estate. Being able to read one additional line of text in my browser window or Slack conversation does literally nothing for me.
I love it. I can grab either end of the title bar just fine. I don't need to waste the entire middle. And if I have multiple windows I'm sacrificing more like 3 lines and it does start to matter.
It’s a tradeoff. I spend most of my time on a laptop screen (even when using an external monitor, the external is my secondary screen) and appreciate the reduction in screen waste. I don’t need or want a huge click area just for moving the window.
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