It is neat and i like how it remembers the sizing and open folders, but it really shows how much Microsoft has neglected Win32 and MDI in particular: the theme is still the same used 12 years ago in Vista and while i am not a fan of the Win8 nor the Win10 theme (my favorite theme is the classic theme), the inconsistency sticks out like a sore thumb. And of course beyond the lack of a visual update (that would take perhaps 1 hour to fix), there are visual glitches like this one: https://i.imgur.com/Vfm5ndc.png (notice the black corners on the window at the right - ironically they happen because of the non-rectangular shape of the titlebar, which would not be the case if the Windows 8 or 10 themes were used since those are rectangular). And i suppose at this point it doesn't make much sense to mention missing features, like double clicking the top edge to maximize a window :-P.
Which sucks because i always liked MDI applications. I know that some studies or whatever have shown that novices often get confused, but personally i find the idea of having a "group" of windows inside the application that manage them to make more sense - especially for visual stuff, like image editors where i can open two views of the same document in different zoom levels. And i also find being able to move and resize the subwindows in any way i want (not limited to splits and such which i find more annoying and a waste of space than helpful).
Having said that i always always disliked, from the first day i saw it, the visual change from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 to make minimized windows look like tiny titlebars (they were called buttons but there is nothing button-y about how they ever looked in any version of Windows from 95 to today) instead of icons. mIRC adding a taskbar-like panel was a much better idea (you could say that novices would again be confused, but from what i remember from the late 90s and early 2000s, that didn't stop people from using mIRC :-P), but just sticking with icons would be fine too (i think icons inside the MDI area were supposed to be used for something else that i don't remember now, but i do not think any program ever used that).
The Win95 styling of the toolbar and some other oldie-looks are likely due to a missing application manifest, not because Win32 doesn't support the newer visual styles.
I was talking about the MDI windows (those inside the client area, the subwindows), not the toolbar. The MDI windows, regardless of manifest, use the Vista theme since their look hasn't been updated for ~12 years.
This is actually something that has been reported to Microsoft before (here is a link for one of the feedback entries linked in one of the issues in the WinFile repository: https://aka.ms/Bjiosw ).
> i suppose at this point it doesn't make much sense to mention missing features, like double clicking the top edge to maximize a window :-P.
wat? By "top edge" do you mean "it's showing a resize cursor"? And if yes, is there a difference between double-clicking there and doubleclicking the titlebar? Genuinely curious.
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> i also find being able to move and resize the subwindows in any way i want (not limited to splits and such which i find more annoying and a waste of space than helpful).
I've been mentally playing around with "what if there was a reality where everything interacted properly and we only needed to worry about designs having good look and feel" for a long time, and tiling makes sense to me as an general idea - it's current implementations, particularly linux windowmanagers, that are disasters-squared. What is it about the freedom to move windows anywhere that is particularly appealing? I ask because I'm trying to get a bit of design perspective.
Hm. Thinking about it, the ability to shove things wherever you want does make a lot of sense generally speaking. I think I'm trying to rank the un/usability of tiling versus MDI window grouping (which I can see breaking down outside of carefully scoped situations).
(Maybe ignore this bit. I tend to mentally ramble to myself about UX all day.)
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> Having said that i always always disliked, from the first day i saw it, the visual change from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 to make minimized windows look like tiny titlebars
Interesting! I'm curious why. The different aesthetic of a bigger icon? (The task buttons did also have an app icon)
FWIW, the iPhone kind of won pretty big using the same approach.
I think I've seen the mIRC task panel, it resembles tabbed browsing somewhat.
Personally I wish I could switch to the correct focus in a given open app from a central location instead of having to focus the app then switch to whatever, but that's just me.
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> (i think icons inside the MDI area were supposed to be used for something else that i don't remember now, but i do not think any program ever used that).
I'm guessing that infrastructure was primarily built out at all for Program Manager.
I've seen some other old applications (I think for online services?) that also did the minimized-MDI-windows-as-icons thing.
> wat? By "top edge" do you mean "it's showing a resize cursor"? And if yes, is there a difference between double-clicking there and doubleclicking the titlebar? Genuinely curious.
Yes, in Windows since 8 (i think) if you doubleclick on the top edge (where the mouse cursor becomes the top/down arrows) you maximize the window vertically (its width remains the same as it was).
> What is it about the freedom to move windows anywhere that is particularly appealing? I ask because I'm trying to get a bit of design perspective.
It is really what you wrote: being able to put things wherever i like and at the size that i like them (the size bit is important since with tiling you can only resize on one dimension), but also because i want to be able to overlap things when that makes sense.
> I think I'm trying to rank the un/usability of tiling versus MDI window grouping (which I can see breaking down outside of carefully scoped situations).
I think that it isn't that different from regular tiling vs floating/overlapping window management (regardless of MDI). But this might be my own bias since i also prefer overlapping window managers to tiling window managers for similar reasons.
> Interesting! I'm curious why. The different aesthetic of a bigger icon? (The task buttons did also have an app icon)
Note that i'm talking about the MDI subwindows here, not the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. Here is an image showing what i mean:
On the left side is the Windows 3.1 File Manager and on the right the linked File Manager (basically the same program but improved a bit) running in Windows 10, in both cases with three MDI subwindows open, two of them being minimized at the bottom left area of the main window.
On Windows 3.1 the minimized MDI subwindows have a clear icon showing what exactly they are and a clearly visible caption. On Windows 10 the minimized MDI subwindows use a "tiny" framed appearance instead of an icon, the caption is not visible at all and you basically have no idea what you are looking at. Note that on Windows 95 and NT4 (which used the same look/theme) things were slightly better, but not much:
Personally i think the bigger and clearer icon, the caption below the icon and the lack of a border/titlebar/buttons/etc that in Win95 and later only waste space is superior both from a visual and from a practical perspective.
> I'm guessing that infrastructure was primarily built out at all for Program Manager.
In Windows 3.1 everything used that, even the Program Manager was an MDI application and the groups were just minimized MDI subwindows. In Windows 95 they changed the look for the minimized subwindows to use the look i show in the shots above instead of using icons, but i remember reading in the win95 visual design guidelines about icons in MDI windows that were supposed to be about something else. However i haven't seen any program using that and the code that previously (in Windows 3.x) created minimized windows as icons, in Win95 created minimized windows as those long bars.
> Yes, in Windows since 8 (i think) if you doubleclick on the top edge (where the mouse cursor becomes the top/down arrows) you maximize the window vertically (its width remains the same as it was).
IIRC most of these window management gestures were introduced in Windows 7, certainly double-clicking top edge works on Windows 7 (I just tried it).
It is neat and i like how it remembers the sizing and open folders, but it really shows how much Microsoft has neglected Win32 and MDI in particular: the theme is still the same used 12 years ago in Vista and while i am not a fan of the Win8 nor the Win10 theme (my favorite theme is the classic theme), the inconsistency sticks out like a sore thumb. And of course beyond the lack of a visual update (that would take perhaps 1 hour to fix), there are visual glitches like this one: https://i.imgur.com/Vfm5ndc.png (notice the black corners on the window at the right - ironically they happen because of the non-rectangular shape of the titlebar, which would not be the case if the Windows 8 or 10 themes were used since those are rectangular). And i suppose at this point it doesn't make much sense to mention missing features, like double clicking the top edge to maximize a window :-P.
Which sucks because i always liked MDI applications. I know that some studies or whatever have shown that novices often get confused, but personally i find the idea of having a "group" of windows inside the application that manage them to make more sense - especially for visual stuff, like image editors where i can open two views of the same document in different zoom levels. And i also find being able to move and resize the subwindows in any way i want (not limited to splits and such which i find more annoying and a waste of space than helpful).
Having said that i always always disliked, from the first day i saw it, the visual change from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 to make minimized windows look like tiny titlebars (they were called buttons but there is nothing button-y about how they ever looked in any version of Windows from 95 to today) instead of icons. mIRC adding a taskbar-like panel was a much better idea (you could say that novices would again be confused, but from what i remember from the late 90s and early 2000s, that didn't stop people from using mIRC :-P), but just sticking with icons would be fine too (i think icons inside the MDI area were supposed to be used for something else that i don't remember now, but i do not think any program ever used that).
EDIT: added a tiny feature to search multiple wildcards separated by semicolons :-) - https://i.imgur.com/vi7BI7B.png
The code style is kinda weird though (3 spaces for each indentation level?) and seems that several comments are out of date :-P.