Sam Dutton’s blog

Lots of dialog boxes in Windows that should be resizable, aren’t.

This is very annoying and completely unneccesary: it’s simple to write the code so dialogs are resizable.

How can this be so after decades of Windows development?

This is one of the world’s Great Interface Mysteries.

Here’s the dialog box that pops up when you edit environment variables in Windows.

The box isn’t resizable so you can’t see all the text without copying it and pasting it somewhere else.

D’oh!

Below is the same but different.

I’d like to be able to see all the commands containing the word show, but I can’t because the box isn’t resizable.

Double d’oh!

What is it about Find & Replace?

Noone seems to get it right.

Visual Studio 2005 is one of the worst culprits.

I guess the main problem is that as with so much Microsoft stuff, they seem caught between catering for beginner and expert – and wind up getting it wrong for both.

1. The box pops up the ‘9 occurrence(s) replaced.’ message in an oversized, separate window – but if you uncheck ‘Always show this message’, the confirmation message is displayed (miles away) on the window frame.

2. Those rather puzzling right-pointing buttons next to the text entry fields are disabled unless you use regular expressions or wildcards – but there’s no way to know that unless you’ve ticked the relevant box, which is hidden.

3. What the hell is ‘Quick Replace’ as opposed to ‘Replace’? Who cares?

4. There are effectively four dialog boxes in total: Quick Find, Quick Replace, Find in Files, Replace in Files. There could easily be just two, or even one.

5. Find & Replace in the HomeSite editor has a wonderful, simple feature: multi-line text fields. You can put line breaks in the find or replace text without scary stuff like regular expressions.

6. Anyway – pop-up boxes are annoying and slow – why not have a simple Find area in the window frame, as in Firefox?