Why does the New menu even exist for creating new empty files?
source link: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20210720-41/?p=105457
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Why does the New menu even exist for creating new empty files?
Raymond
July 20th, 2021
What’s the point of having a New menu anyway? “Why would anybody create a new BMP file by right-clicking an empty space in a folder? You still need a BMP editor to put anything meaningful in there. The same is true for a PowerPoint presentation, and an Access database. Although, creating an empty Access database and then opening it will presumably get you the Access program. But if I want to create a new PowerPoint presentation, I will… um… open PowerPoint.”
Sure, maybe that’s what you do, but that’s not what everybody does.
Not everybody knows that the way to create a new BMP file is to open this program called Paint that is hidden in the Accessories folder of your Start menu. User research shows that for many users, the way they create a new file is to find an existing file of the same type, copy it, then open the copy and delete everything in it.¹
In fact, in the Xerox Star (the precursor to our modern GUI interfaces), creating a new document is done by copying an existing one.
For people with a document-centric view of the world, programs aren’t really things that you think about. What you really work on are documents.
It’s like making a telephone call in the United States. You don’t think about which telecommunications company serves that number. You just dial the number and let the telephone network figure out which telecommunications company is responsible for that number. You don’t really care which company gets used, as long as you get connected.
As other people noted in the comments, having a New menu is handy because it lets you create the file directly where you want it, saving you the trouble of having to navigate through the Save As dialog just to get back to where you started.
¹ And who among us can say they never created a new class or project by copying an existing one, and then deleting everything inside?
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13 comments
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Chris Bristol
July 20, 2021 7:49 am
While the use case and justification seem reasonable, the solution leaves some strange gaps, like if I use the New -> BMP File, I get a zero byte file, which will not open in Photos (and Photos reports that it doesn’t support the format). This seems like a solution that worked well for plain text files, but probably not much else. A better option would probably be for applications to register themselves during installation as an application that can create a particular file type, and then could at least create a valid file of that type, like a fully transparent image file, or an empty PPT, word document, etc… I’m not sure how you’d deal with multiple applications supporting the same file type, like having both Gimp and Photoshop installed, but there’s options there.
Entegy
July 20, 2021 7:57 am
The New menu shouldn’t open the app in question (except for Access for whatever reason), so it doesn’t matter if multiple apps can open a file type. You make the file, then click to open it at which point it’s a normal file that will get opened by your default app. That’s why you get the Photos weirdness, it’s typically the default app that opens picture formats. Your “better” seems it would just cause confusion.
I use the New menu all the time for text files (which I then often change the file extension, Word files, and Excel files. I wouldn’t want the New menu to force open Notepad just because I made a text file as I’m often going to change its extension.
Owen Rudge
July 20, 2021 3:50 pm
I’m sure back in the Windows 9x days at least there was a way of supplying template files for the New context menu. I suspect that functionality still exists – whether any applications use it may be another matter of course.
Peter Cooper Jr.
July 20, 2021 7:59 am
Really it seems like there should be an easier-to-use connection between the folders as seen through the file viewer and the open/save/etc. dialogs within applications. Windows treats the file dialog as a complete file-folder window, where you can rename, move, drag-and-drop, and otherwise manipulate everything while saving on opening a file. Macs, on the other hand (at least when I last used one regularly) have this interesting trick where you can drag a file from a folder into a save/open dialog, in order to change the directory of the dialog and select a file. I find that I kind of want both behaviors, where sometimes I want to drag-and-drop to mean “move/copy a file” and sometimes I would want it to mean “look here at the same thing that I’m looking at in this other window”.
It’s just really awkward a lot of times how I have a window where I want it, but then (to save a download in a web browser or whatever) I need to like copy-and-paste the address bar into the save dialog box’s address bar to get it to the same point.
Rereading my comment here, it might not be as clear what the connection is to the article as it originally was in my mind, but I think I’m trying to get at that the system (both Mac and Windows, though with different tradeoffs) tries to support both a “document-centric” mindset and an “application-centric” mindset and doesn’t make it easy at all to switch between the two (much as the article’s example demonstrates).
John Elliott
July 20, 2021 9:17 am
The RISC OS save dialogue goes the other way – it contains only an edit control for the filename, and an icon which you drag to the folder window where you want to save it.
What increases the aggravation when saving files under Windows is that a lot of applications re-implement the file dialog and do it badly (no names, no packdrill).
Ivan K
July 20, 2021 8:01 am
mspaint… and then you have to remember that ctrl^s will overwrite an existing file haha meh.
Alexey Badalov
July 20, 2021 10:49 am
What else might you expect it to do? This is what every other application does.
Fleet Command
July 20, 2021 11:14 am
Apparently, things have changed. Windows 11 has gotten rid of the New menu. A Microsoft blog post says the Windows development team is disposing of the unused context menu items based on telemetry.
Mike Morrison
July 20, 2021 4:03 pm
“As other people noted in the comments, having a New menu is handy because it lets you create the file directly where you want it, saving you the trouble of having to navigate through the Save As dialog just to get back to where you started.” That may work for a document-centric view of the world, but for other viewpoints, that process doesn’t make sense. Personall,y I don’t see the point in navigating to the place where I want to store the file, then creating a new one, and then filling in the content; I start the program first, to get my ideas down on “paper” so to speak, and then save it in a folder of my choosing. So there’s no “just to get back to where you started” in this viewpoint because I started with the editor program, not the destination folder.
Semi Essessi
July 20, 2021 5:10 pm
As a programmer I use this constantly. VS code handles making new files OK… But making a new file in VS proper is so easy to get wrong that I never use it to make new files.
I’ve worked at a few places where there is a strong guideline to never create files with VS due to the bad default locations and poor handling of additions to the project and filter files.
M. C. Battilana
July 20, 2021 5:17 pm
I like the “that’s not what everybody does” thinking.
By that logic, why not restore the beloved Recent Items entry in the Start menu? You could even fix it, by allowing Open File location to work even if the file was renamed (after all, it is the location you want to access). Sure, you now have something similar on a per-app basis. But that’s not what everybody does
And the beloved Quick Launch Toolbar also had one good thing that was lost with all the recent innovation: you could put many small “launcher” icons at predictable, immutable locations which would not jump around, and which you could access by muscle memory alone. Why not restore something similar, perhaps blending in the more powerful right-click taskbar menu options?
While I enjoy always using the latest, I so very badly miss both features of older systems.
Leverette, Jack
July 20, 2021 5:26 pm
Tangential, but germane—I wonder at least weekly why WinOS lacks a native touch command. (as a native cmd command, system32 exe or even something in PowerShell or pwsh). Just something easy to call on from a shell.
Miguel Hernandez
July 20, 2021 7:45 pm
I’ve used copy con file.txt. Not as easy as touch and not scriptable since it requires ctrl+z to save the empty file.
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