Windows 11: a survey of text boxes

<i>Windows Terminal colour dialog</i><p>My response upon seeing that was &quot;WTF! That looks ridiculously amateurish!&quot; It almost feels like it&#x27;s trolling me. Even the labels somehow manage to have a different size of font than the rest of the dialog, something a noob in the 90s using Visual Basic drag-and-drop to create dialogs would not produce without expending (considerable) additional effort.<p>Ironically, Win32 has had a much more full-featured and standard dialog for choosing colours since Windows 3.x:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;windows&#x2F;win32&#x2F;dlgbox&#x2F;color-dialog-box" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;windows&#x2F;win32&#x2F;dlgbox&#x2F;color-...</a>

I don&#x27;t understand why microsoft doesn&#x27;t have a small team dedicated to look and feel and just bringing it all up to date - all those control panel applets, have they finally been upgraded?

As a longtime iOS engineer trying to prototype something on Windows, I did not realize how good I&#x27;ve had it while working with UIKit.<p>I just want Microsoft to give me the one true Blessed Way to write Windows apps. Instead it seems like there are 5 true Blessed Ways, and if I want something performant I need to use 20 year old APIs?<p>I was going to dig in to GDI+ for fast text styling performance but saw an offhand comment in some forum today that you can use DirectX for performant text rendering. How do people discover this information under normal circumstances?

As someone who hasn&#x27;t had to use Windows since XP, is anyone able to explain the technicals of how this even happens? I mean, at a complete OS layman&#x27;s level, one would assume that someone somewhere comes up with the design for how a text input should look across the OS, someone else probably writes the UI code for that, someone else maybe writes the plumbing for it, then _everyone_ uses it whenever they need a text input. What is it about Windows that means this is impossible? Their UIs are like the jumble sale aisle down the middle of Lidl.

The hyper consistent UI guidelines of the 80s and 90s were born in an era when we had to convince grown human beings to use these brand new (to them) systems without feeling too embarrassed about being awful at it.<p>Today, and perhaps for decades to come, by the time someone touches a PC, they&#x27;ve been screwing around on phones and tablets. They live their lives on the internet and apps, where &quot;standard looking&quot; often implies &quot;cheap and knock-off&quot;, and long term consistency often implies &quot;stale and old&quot;. They already know that nothing is consistent, and things aren&#x27;t always what they seem.<p>Today the point on significantly diminishing returns on spending resources on UI consistency is lower than ever. It&#x27;s fun to pick on the textboxes, but it doesn&#x27;t matter. It won&#x27;t stop anyone from being productive and happy using the software.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;windows&#x2F;apps&#x2F;design&#x2F;signature-experiences&#x2F;design-principles" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;windows&#x2F;apps&#x2F;design&#x2F;signatu...</a><p>Didn&#x27;t worked well?<p>The UI on Windows is problematic since Windows XP. Microsoft doesn&#x27;t maintain actually the libraries for the UI, they just add new libraries. And developers learned that on Windows you can do whatever you want.<p>* Win32 (C, requires experience but reliable?)<p>* Microsoft Foundation Classes (C++, Win32)<p>* WTL (C++, Win32)<p>* Windows Forms (.net)<p>* Windows Presentation Foundation (.net)<p>* WinUI (C#, C++)<p>Please tell me if you forgot a UI library provided by Microsoft?<p>Gtk tries to make Gtk2, Gtk3 and Gtk4 look somewhat same and integrated applications of GNOME feel rather same. Similar for Qt and KDE and for Apple. Honestly, Firefox and LibreOffice doesn&#x27;t fit perfectly. This is also the reason for Epiphany, which is using Gtk natively. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.gnome.org&#x2F;hig&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.gnome.org&#x2F;hig&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;develop.kde.org&#x2F;hig&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;develop.kde.org&#x2F;hig&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;design&#x2F;human-interface-guidelines&#x2F;macos&#x2F;overview&#x2F;themes&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;design&#x2F;human-interface-guideline...</a><p>I miss a HIG for TUI (*curses). The behavior of CLI applications is partially defined by GNU (-l, --long, -L) but of rourse requires reading the manual: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;prep&#x2F;standards&#x2F;html_node&#x2F;Command_002dLine-Interfaces.html#Command_002dLine-Interfaces" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;prep&#x2F;standards&#x2F;html_node&#x2F;Command_002dLin...</a>

Maybe I’m just being pedantic, but when an OS uses 4+ different design languages across all the system software, While it has little to no effect on my ability to get work done, I simply prefer looking at a pretty, consistent UI.<p>To be fair, macOS isn’t perfect either, especially with some of the system apps that have become the iOS equivalent running on macOS in the past years. Although I do find macOS to have greater consistency overall than Windows.

We live in the world of web apps and electron now, UI consistency is dead and buried because they killed it. Windows&#x27;s UI mess is just a reflection of them hiring modern developers.

I&#x27;m still pissed they haven&#x27;t fixed Windows Explorer&#x27;s &quot;Open with...&quot; popup since they Metro-ified it. It used to be you could type-to-select from the list of apps...now I have to use the mouse to scroll down.

Even font rendering is inconsistent: notice how Win32 widgets use subpixel antialiasing but the modern ones don&#x27;t.

Sad truth is that nobody cares. Not the users, not the makers. It would take a minuscule fraction of Microsoft&#x27;s resources to fix this, especially when they are anyway making a new OS. But other considerations take precedence, since nobody really cares if textboxes look alike.

Dear Microsoft: Just clone Zukitre giving consistency and a neutral gray-ish scheme to everything.<p>I am not an artist but media producers love the neutral gray and so does everyone else. Light themes are too bright.

Windows hasn&#x27;t had a consistent look and feel since Windows 95; even Win95 OSR2 brought some Active Desktop widgets and browser integration into explorer, which broke the uniformity of the UI.

Is it hard to make all these elements consistent?

My designer eye makes me really feel bad by looking at these all close together

And they say linux desktop environments UI is inconsistent...

paging for the next time someone complains about cross-platform solutions not following the OS design guidelines exactly