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A little while ago I ran Windows XP in a VM, inside Windows 10.

I noted that when I pressed the start key, the start menu opened.

I noted that when I pressed Win+E, an explorer window opened.

Fully rendered. After a single video frame.

On Windows 10, the same thing happens, only several hundred milliseconds later, and then you get to enjoy watching the UI elements get painted in one at a time.

Twenty years of progress.

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I was really excited when I saw tabs were coming to the file explorer, but I can't tell now if I don't like tabs in file explorer or if I don't like all the other things that made file explorer worse when tabs got added
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> Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs

Hey now! The `nautilus' file browser on linux got me hooked on tabs and for years it's been a glaring deficiency of File Explorer. Many tasks involve a collection of directories, and tabs can be ideal for reducing demand for screen space.

I concede the the current Windows implementation is poor but I hope they improve it, rather than dumping tabs entirely.

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>Many tasks involve a collection of directories, and tabs can be ideal for reducing demand for screen space.

double pane with tabs would be handy so you could inspect or move files between two tabs. also, i'd really love two pane: filesystem and content viewer

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That would actually be a great feature. Opening two file browsers to move stuff around is a really common workflow. Although with current trends we might instead get a chat bot prompt “tell me how you feel about where you want your files to be”
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welcome to Norton Commander! Or Far Manager for more modern version.
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The tabs are fine. Tabs in "cmd" are also good.

The window handles, on the other hand .. this was correct in Windows 3.0 and there's basically no good reason to have changed it. There should be a title bar. Active window should have visibly contrasting title bar. There should be sufficient grab space all round a window to get hold of it.

Bonus points: move your mouse pointer very slowly around a bottom curved corner window handle on Windows 11. Ask yourself: how well does "place I am pointing at" line up with "where the curve is"?

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The tabs and address bar on Explorer seem to actually be a copy of the default behavior of Dolphin.

If you are going to copy someone, copy from the best, I guess. But Microsoft managed fill their top-space¹ and not let enough space for the address to be properly displayed, so they need to hide information all the time.

The tabs on PowerShell are actually not a copy of Konsole. I guess that's why I always get annoyed by them on Windows, but not on Linux.

1 - There's actual less stuff than on KDE, if you don't count empty space.

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Oh man. the complete lack of definition or contrast from window to window is terrible. Which window are you clicking on? Nobody knows. It's especially painful when you have like three or four nested RDP sessions going on.
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>Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs

Speak for yourself. Tabs in file explorer and notepad are my favorite windows feature in decades. I can't believe it took them this long.

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Ya, I just started using them in File Explorer recently and I really like them because I frequently had multiple windows open within the same tree, this is much cleaner. I can't believe it took me so long to actually click the "+" and try it.
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You can pull the File Explorer tabs from my cold, dead hands!

Also, I'm pretty sure the tabs were WinUI/XAML based, not WebView2 based. There are some "Electron" (i.e. web tech stack) components in File Explorer these days but I don't think most of the things you're complaining about are part of that.

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Tabs and breadcrumbs are both useful features though, that almost every other OS/DE file manager has supported since forever
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Meanwhile I've been happily using ls, find, grep like it is 1980s.

They still work exactly the same, and now even my agents can do it.

Imagine if agents attempted to use explorer, even powershell seems like it is confusing enough.

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Every time I was forced to use Windows 7, file browser tabs are something I missed dearly from Linux. But now that I'm forced to use Windows for work almost every day, I find that I almost never use file browser tabs on Windows. No idea why. The tabs show only the dirname, which is what I would want the tabs to do. The UX is mostly okay.

Not being able to grab the top left of the window and drag feels really strange. Plenty of apps encroach on the top bar, but they almost never encroach on the top left. That's where the icon lives, that's the sacred "move the window" space.

Slack has the same problem (hamburger menu in the top left captures clicks, plus a giant search bar in the center) and it's bothersome. But with Slack I don't notice it because I don't really move Slack around. It's permanently maximized on a secondary display. I move Explorer windows around constantly, so I notice it.

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I tried win 11 for 11 minutes and switched to Linux and never looked back.
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I've been on bazzite for a little over a year and nothing is as satisfying as turning on my computer, getting to the desktop...and silence. No alerts. No sounds. No popups. It's just a blank slate every time.

You really cannot appreciate it until you experience it for a few weeks. It's that new car smell but all the time.

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Maybe "don't ruin stuff" should be a KPI
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every day i am more glad i cannot update to 11 because windows 10 seems to be better in every way
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Of the things that you could complain about modern Explorer and Notepad, you choose tabs? Really? A handy QoL feature that many have been requesting?
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Gotta keep the “I’m such a greybeard, I do things more clumsily than others but look how techy and old school I am” act somehow, right?
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