The ribbon is much more convenient than hunting through poorly organized menus...

The ribbon is fucking awful, the biggest anti-pattern of our time. I'm glad no one followed MS.

Why? I seriously want all the autism you can must to tell exactly why? I casually use office and the ribbon helps me navigate the program instead of all the drop downs. The only complaint I hear from power users boils down to
even though the ribbon is now 10 years old.

AutoCAD did but that also has the command line so you can largely ignore it.

Didn't we just have a thread a while back about what a cancerous piece of fucking shit the ribbon interface was and how many people continue to use Office 2003 or switched to Libre Office because of it?

Jokes aside, there are actually faggots that want LibreOffice to adopt the ribbon design. I hope that never happens, but if it does, there better be a port without it.

The thing I cannot fucking stand is the "quick access toolbar". Placing save/undo/redo buttons next to first level application menus or close window should be punished by being taken out back and shot.

They pretty much did, except they did it right. The "ribbon" toolboxes are on the sides, where they should be - not on the top, where they waste precious vertical space. The toolbar in LibreOffice is vestigial and I recommend hiding it altogether.

Imagine you have a workspace and you have some tools or parts (screws, cogs, pins, whatever) in small boxes, neatly lined up on your desk or a shelf or something. Then some egghead straight out of academia with a worthless design degree comes along, sees that one an average among the people in the workshop some parts are used more frequently than others and decides to "optimize" your workspace. He puts the parts people use more frequently into larger boxes, the stuff used less frequently into smaller boxes and then optimizes the boxes by playing Tetris with them to stuff them into as little space as possible.

So the next day you come to work and find that all your neatly lined up boxes are all over the place. They are no longer grouped by their function, but by some weirdly averaged metric. When you need one of the less frequent parts it's harder to grab because all the big boxes are obscuring your vision and the parts are no longer associated by function. Also now you have boxes that contain boxes instead of just one neat line. Oh sure, you could shift the boxes back into the order you like, but you still have the distractingly large boxes obscuring the smaller ones.

Ribbons are a one size fits none solution that could only have been made by eggheads..

I'm not sure I would flatter the ribbon enough to call it designed by an egghead.

The ribbon is a case of stupid bullshit thought up to give Microsoft something to patent and planned obsolescence.

Ever notice that while technology improves, Microsoft word has only gotten slower?

As if one of those shitbrain designers were smart enough to know what I want to do. Everytime I've had to use these "ribbons" I had to hack my way around them to format something properly.

Because LibreOffice does not have MS Word 97's poorly organized menus.

Wasn't the ribbon invented because it would be easier to recreate with HTML?

But you would know what all the tools in your workspace are and where they are since you set it up. This is like having almost complete knowledge of the office interface and where everything is, which most people don't. Most people go hunting through menu for many rarely used functions.

A better analogy is this: You don't have your own workspace, but there's a guy who maintains one and lets other people use his. He doesn't use it himself so he designs it purely with mass-utility in mind. There's all sorts of tools, way more than you will ever need, and outside of the tiny fraction that you use frequently, you have to constantly ask people where the tool is or search for it yourself. Searching takes a very long time because most of these tools are hidden in opaque, ambiguously labeled drawers, so you have to pull out every drawer one by one when looking for a tool. On top of that the tools are in opaque boxes with only a name written on them, so you have to open the box to see what the tool looks like.

Then someone comes in and reorganizes it so that more tools are sitting on the shelf instead of drawers, they are grouped by purpose and not alphabetically, and the more important ones are in transparent boxes so you can visually find the tool you need.

Then the one nerd who memorized the contents of every drawer and cabinet comes in and starts bitching about how his autism got triggered.

This would be fine as far as I'm concerned.

I don't know what you do but it took me a grand total of one minute to learn everything I needed every time I wanted to do something I didn't know. What exactly are you doing that you need to hack the ribbon to get what you need?

Because with VIM and LaTeX you don't even need a GUI to make the most beautiful documents.

Every CAD program since the 2000's has used "ribbon" style interfaces. It makes sense in any application where you have an enormous number of functions that can be grouped into sane categories.

Drag and dropping images and WYSIWYG editing is very useful in certain kinds of documents. Namely, long personal notes that don't have to be beautifully typeset, but must be written quickly and yet use lots of pictures and tables arranged just so.

Latex is better for things that you write with very long iterations - ie. a book where you would write for hours before needing to compile. Whenever I try to do more informal work notebooks and stuff where I need to compile every few sentences, it becomes a nightmare.

And don't even mention the horrors of Latex tables.

Not saying Latex or VIM is bad, they're obviously excellent tools for their particular area, but that area is not all-encompassing. There are still some things at which Word and clones really shine.

Incidentally, what do you guys use for editing textual spreadsheet formats like tab-delimited or csv? MS Excel is awful for it because it constantly bitches about losing formatting when saving. I feel like I'm using the wrong tool but don't know what would be write. Notepad++ doesn't work either because I need it to be displayed like a table sometimes.

This is pretty much why I like it in Office. I don't care enough to learn Office properly, and it's like every other time I write a document I need to learn some new function I've never used before. The ribbon makes it very easy to just figure things out as I go instead of needing to "learn" them separately.

By the way that PDF doesn't really do a good job of showing of Latex's capabilities. If you used the Computer Modern Font and made a few basic spacing etc. modifications, MS Word can easily produce very similar documents. This picture is meant to point out how Latex is better at judging where to break lines and hyphenate (obviously it has more time to calculate these things being compiled and not real time), but interesting as a "fair comparison".

I think what Latex really excels at over word is:

None of that is evident from your PDF. The table under 1 is probably the most impressive feat, but it wouldn't be hard to do in Word either. You haven't even used the syntax highlighting package (something that's actually hard in Word), the margins of the table cells are too small, and the tabs in your code are too long. All your other tables have ugly borders, booktabs is generally consider a much better style. Under 5 the table is weirdly laid out vs. the grep mem_heap_B... command. Most of your paragraphs are short so the linebreaking and hyphenation isn't really demonstrated. Under Conclusion, the URL is too close to the line above and should be blue with an underline. You don't have any cool page headers/footers/side elements, no TOC and no bibliography. The equations under 3 also look very cluttered and should have been /rfrac's.

I'm not saying this to be nitpicky, but if I had seen this PDF when I didn't know Latex, I'd just think "why bother learning this when I could just use the same font in Word". It shows very little of the real strengths of Latex.

I know about syntax highlighting, but it's been hard to learn for me and all my convenient templates are on my Wangblows machine 700 km away. Besides it's the best document I have right now. Last year I made some awesome CS assignments with TikZ (which is also excellent for electrical circuits) and syntax highlighted listings but they're all on my Wangblows machine.

By the way, what's so much better about pdf-LaTeX's hyphenation aside from it trying harder to hyphenate in the middle of the word?

I think it also tries not to hyphenate excessively, and has a more thorough system for correctly splitting some words.

I think I mainly used it for Python, it was pretty easy with listings.

My preamble had:
\usepackage[procnames]{listings}\usepackage{color}

Then inside the document I had:
\definecolor{keywords}{RGB}{255,0,90}\definecolor{comments}{RGB}{0,0,113}\definecolor{red}{RGB}{160,0,0}\definecolor{green}{RGB}{0,150,0} \lstset{language=Python, basicstyle=\ttfamily\small, keywordstyle=\color{keywords}, commentstyle=\color{comments}, stringstyle=\color{red}, showstringspaces=false, identifierstyle=\color{green}, procnamekeys={def,class}, breaklines=true}

And the code blocks looked like:
\begin{lstlisting}[frame=single]somepythoncodehere\end{lstlisting}

Dunno if that helps.

It's ridiculous how the DOS versions perform better than the current version of Office

I still can't believe that you have to search manually into insanely bloated menus for every command in common software instead of being able to do a shortcut, type the first letters of what you want and enter like with Sublime Text's command palette.

LibreOffice will soon get a Ribbon-like UI called Notebookbar.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribbon_(computing)

A ribbon is only good when you need pictures. Otherwise it just takes up more space.

The firefox toolbar or, heck, any toolbar for web browsers are a good contrast to something like a document program with things like styles and stuff. A great example of overused ribbons is the EMET program for Windows.

Even then it's debatable how much "better" a ribbon toolbar is.

Fucking cancer.

Big menu icons are nothing new, OP.
Ribbon takes too much screen space to be useful, unless you use only maximized windows all the time, defeating the point of having a window system in the first place. Icons are mostly not necessary if you're literate. Images are easier for our brains to parse, true, but text processors and file managers are not real time strategy games where every second counts. Functionality should come before aesthetics in user interface and ribbons are not functional, they're a cluttered mess.

...

Oh wow they stuffed that ribbon shit into their file manager too now? When did this happen?

YOu posted that same image with the same strawman argument shit on Holla Forums.

Quit being a nigger and start posting constructively.

Don't you end up hunting down items on ribbon menu? It actually can take longer since, unlike menus with neatly organized items one after another, ribbons have columns with one, two, even three items with different sizes all over the top of the window.
Still, the best approach, is to have a type to run command like Emacs, or a dedicated space for the user to the type the commands, like ACME. Pop up menus are not the best solution, but are better than ribbons.

Windows 10.

Ribbons are shit. If you care about efficiency why haven't you memorized the hotkeys?

It's off by default.

I wish they had these for word processors.

antichangefags BTFO

Well a browser is not for editing, it's for viewing. Workflow is very different.

Most icons on the ribbon are not big. They are usually sized according to importance of use.

I often do when say working on a single document

Well no, it just means that ribbon interfaces are not always the best approach. I agree for instance that adding ribbon to the file manager was incredibly stupid, since the file manage already has a small number of functions that are not hard to locate.

Well, no, when basic functions take extra work it makes the real work more exhausting and reduces productivity. Also it's not just speed, icons can take up less space as well.

If they're not on the main page (Home tab for normal typing, Design tab for images and tables). The most common functions are in the main page so you rarely have to go hunting, and when you do go hunting, all you have to do is glance through a few tabs. It's faster than going through menus (where checking sub-menus and reading takes time) and scanning badly laid out toolbars (where you need to wait for tooltips to popup).

It's not really meant to be a magic thing that solves all your problems. It just makes the program slightly less annoying to use for novice and intermediate users.

Then it would have a steep learning curve because it doesn't address the problem of knowing what commands are available.

Hotkeys only make sense for frequently used functions, or if the hotkeys are assigned by some logical system and you can at least guess what they would be without looking up.

With a word processor there are a lot of tasks each of which I do very rarely, so learning the hotkey would be a waste of time, but put together they represent a significant part of my workflow.

Forgot to say, the main benefit is basically being a better organized toolbar.

Thanks, your post sure was a lot more constructive than mine. At least I know what a strawman argument actually means.

YES. Specially because they're not neatly organized in a category -> subcategory tree. They're mostly just good for quick shortcuts.

Not exactly. I had a good time learning Emacs, there's the tutorial, the menu based help system and the regexp help search. So, even if you don't know the command, you can look for the effects of the command.

For instance, I had to work with Oracle SQL once, after a quick look for "sql" on the Emacs's help system, I learned that there's even a client for direct access a database.

But it will be a choice in LibreOffice.

You mean Windows 8.

latex masterrace reporting in.

Better fucking not come at the expense of anything else.

Agreed, I can sift through categories based on what I'm looking for. Instead of hunting for where the border color icon/menu option is, I can do find it quick under the Design tab.

What do you mean? They're simply adding multiple preset toolbar layouts for us to choose from. You can test them out in the 5.3 alpha already.