> It's way easier to find the correct tool bar icon than trying to hunt for a feature inside the menus.
What? I am just completely confused by this—menu items are labeled in clear textual language, sorted roughly by functionality. icons greatly depend on cultural context. Looking at a screenshot of notepad++ I could would understand maybe a third of the icons and could guess at another third at best.
That said, it's not that big of a deal—I'd probably just disable the toolbar rather than figure it out. I don't really use the mouse outside of selecting regions of text anyway.
I find it depends on how many things are in the toolbar, and if the icons are actually icons or monochromatic glyphs.
A toolbar that’s populated only with the most frequently used functions and employs full color, uniquely shaped icons can be visually grokked in an instant, whereas a densely packed toolbar full of glyphs is inscrutable at a glance.
Once you learn a toolbar, it just becomes visual and muscle memory. Not unlike using hotkeys to access something hidden under a couple layers of menus.
Sure, but that's very different from "feature discovery". I totally get this with the floppy-disk icon (which is, ironically enough, now a terrible visual metaphor for persisting to local storage outside of cultural context), but I have no clue what "up arrow on top of down arrow" means, nor what the ¶ icon would do—start a new paragraph? Select the current paragraph? Open some kind of paragraph outline?
Granted, I don't use windows so it's entirely possible I'm just showing my ass here.
The toolbar buttons all have hover text to ease the learning, ¶ is "Show All Characters" where "characters" mean stuff like Carriage Return and whitespace. Microsoft Word users are probably familiar with this meaning.
I have no idea what "up arrow on top of down arrow" is though, because I don't have that button.
What? I am just completely confused by this—menu items are labeled in clear textual language, sorted roughly by functionality. icons greatly depend on cultural context. Looking at a screenshot of notepad++ I could would understand maybe a third of the icons and could guess at another third at best.
That said, it's not that big of a deal—I'd probably just disable the toolbar rather than figure it out. I don't really use the mouse outside of selecting regions of text anyway.