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Outline/reference on the left, work on the right; skeuomorphism or deeper reasons?
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Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 25, 2018 at 02:10 PM
Prompted by the recent discussion on ultrawide monitors, multiple monitors and/or multiple windows side-by-side on the same screen, I confirmed for myself that when working on most mentally demanding tasks, I tend to place any reference material to the left and do my actual work on the right.
In the physical world, this makes practical sense: I am right-handed, so objects on my right would probably interfere with what I am doing. But I tend to do the same on my main screen: e.g. for a translation, I will split the screen real estate into two windows and keep the original text on the left, while working on my editor on the right.
Looking at software, a similar trend seems to exist. Almost all two-pane outliners that I am aware of show the outline on the left, and the detail pane on the right. The one exception I know is Emeditor, where the outline is produced by a plug-in which can be hidden or shown on the far right, along with other tools https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KmKjcTfzfc I imagine that in some programmes like UltraRecall whose pane positions are customisable, this ‘inverse’ setup can also be achieved; apparently Open Office can do it.
In Word as in many online tools, comments are entered on the right. This could well be a case of skeuomorphism, mimicking the way that most (right-handed) people will scribble their comments on the right margin of a document. Nevertheless it confirms the ‘reference on the left, input to the right’ approach. Not sure if there’s a difference when writing in Right-to-Left languages.
I wonder if there be more to this, e.g. something to do with right- and left- brain processing? Am I missing something obvious?
Posted by nirans@gmail.com
Aug 25, 2018 at 02:25 PM
The eye tracks from right to left. It is easier to keep reference materials on the left - the eyes slide from the reference to the writing space easily. I suspect this might be different for cultures that read right to left.IMO.
Posted by satis
Aug 25, 2018 at 10:04 PM
I think it’s cultural. Western languages read from left to right.
I own (but only occasionally use) a Japanese ePub reader on my Mac called Murasaki. It has the sidebar on the right, and is actually a delight to use.
Pic: https://cl.ly/77a3b5c26173
Early versions of Mac OS X’s Aqua UI (until 2004/5) supported a sidebar concept called, drawers, which popped outside the application window frame, usually on the right. (Can’t remember if this was always the case for all apps, but I remember the drawer sometimes switching to the left in (some?) apps if the window was against the right side of the monitor.)
At the time, in addition to standard Mac apps like Mail, 3rd-party apps like Transmit, OmniWeb, Shiira and BBEdit adopted the drawers. There were a lot of complaints about the drawers, and I believe they were deprecated in mid-2005 with the advent of Mac OS 10.4 Tiger, in favor of the now-standard left-oriented sidebar.
Posted by Paul J. Miller
Aug 26, 2018 at 12:13 AM
I have tried it both ways round and I always find I am more comfortable with the notes/text on the right and the tree/outline on the left. I don’t know if this is a result of my culture or not.
I have at least two monitors on every system I work on and when I am working on my laptop at work the monitor on the right is lower resolution and not as good (fuzzy with washed out colours) and I had aranged things so that the floating window containing the notes/text was on the right in this monitor. So a while ago I thought I would try it the other way round to take advantage of the sharp high DPI screen of my laptop. I only worked with it like this for 20 minutes before switching back because it feels more natural for me to have the tree on the left and the text on the right. It shouldn’t make that much of a difference but for me it does.
InfoQube has a very configurable interface. You can have the tree on the right, left or in a floating window in another monitor. The same with the text, you can have it right, left or floating. So I tried this configuration again after reading this post and for me it still feels wrong to have the text on the left and the tree on the right.
I am right handed by the way.
Posted by Paul Korm
Aug 26, 2018 at 01:41 AM
It seems most apps that have an “inspector” for adjusting settings in a document will place the inspector on the right of the screen. In several mind mapping apps, the Notes inspector and outline view is included in the inspector panel, and thus also on the right. XMind and iMindMap come to mind.