Hello. Where can I download the old version of Lens with good old UI?
The new design is so bad. In my 10-year career, I’ve never wanted to roll back any software except for Lens.
Everything is flat and small, with no contrast and no icons. Loading times are much slower than before. In case of a bug, I could use cmd+R in the old version, but it just leaves me with a blank gray page in the new version.
Why is the terminal tab pinned to a specific resource tab? Why can’t I switch to another tab and preserve the terminal tab? It’s so annoying.
I’m wondering if the Lens developers use this app in their work.
Hello! Thank you so much for taking the time to share your thoughts about the latest version of Lens. Your feedback is incredibly valuable, and we genuinely appreciate your honesty. We’re sorry to hear that the new UI and performance haven’t met your expectations. We want Lens to be the best possible experience for you and the community, so we’re taking your concerns seriously. Here’s what we’re working on based on feedback like yours:
Contrast and Icons: We understand your frustration with the new UI being too flat and lacking contrast. While we plan to stick with a flat design overall, we’re considering adding a “high contrast” mode to improve visibility for users who need it. We’re also evaluating how we can bring back icons in a meaningful way that aids navigation without adding unnecessary clutter. We want to make sure that every visual element serves a purpose.
Performance: We know the current version feels slower (especially when jumping between different resources) compared to previous releases, and improving performance is our top priority. The new version should outperform the old one, and we’re working hard to achieve that.
In some cases, performance issues may be related to users accidentally running the Intel version of Lens on an Apple M-series Mac, which significantly degrades performance. If you’re using an M-series Mac, please check that you’re running the correct version: right-click on the Lens application in Finder, select “Get Info,” and make sure the “Kind” is listed as “Application (Apple silicon).”
cmd+R Issue: We’re investigating why this shortcut isn’t working reliably and are committed to fixing the functionality.
Terminal and Tab Experience: We also recognize the inconvenience with the terminal tab being pinned. We’re discussing solutions to allow the terminal to persist across tabs, providing more flexibility. Improving this behavior is already one of our top priorities.
We really appreciate your patience as we work on these improvements. Your feedback is helping us make Lens better for everyone
@jakolehm Thanks for the suggestion to look at the distribution architecture. Somehow two different modern Apple silicon Macs were incorrectly switched to the Intel versions. I switched them back to the correct Arm versions and performance within Lens improved dramatically.
Agree with others. The new UI is a giant step backwards. I miss the hotbar, large icons, focused resource list. The new single tree Navigator is cluttered and my custom icons for clusters too small to be distinguishable.
We are planning to push the version with performance improvements to the beta channel today/tomorrow unless we hit into last minute blocker issues during testing.
Just wanted to echo this. The dark mode is 100% unusable. Did any designer test this or even check against common best practices? Like the contrast between the main text and background is terrible. Also, the app is 3x slower then most of your competitors. Endless spinners/loaders even when just looking at resources on a local minikube.
Just need to add my feedback here. I’ve used Lens for work for at least a couple of years now. I used the HotBar to be able to easily navigate between 30+ clusters that I had grouped and sorted for ease of use (and so I didn’t screw up a production environment when I was really aiming for the dev ones). I was able to rename each “Cluster Name” to something that made it easy to tell the clusters apart (full ARNs are way too long, and I have short names I reference them by). I am glad they had different colors, but other than providing distinction, I have mentally mapped the positions on and hotbar #, more so than the colors.
The new UI does not appear to have a way to edit the cluster names or give them some sort of alias, and nor is there a way to hide which clusters appear in the UI. I have rights to a whole bunch of EKS clusters, but I certainly do not want or need to see them all all the time. The “AWS EKS” listing is better visually than the “Local Kubeconfigs”, but with every single cluster listed and expanded the entire UI is unusable for me as is. I expect using the VS Code type model might be helpful when I have to jump back and forth between clusters to compare what’s happening, but with all the extra Navigation noise right now, I can’t get passed to the rest of your changes. It’s too unwieldy to even try to get used to!
The new UI does not appear to have a way to edit the cluster names or give them some sort of alias, and nor is there a way to hide which clusters appear in the UI.
You can edit the cluster name by right-clicking the cluster in the navigator and then selecting “Show Cluster Settings”.
I expect using the VS Code type model might be helpful when I have to jump back and forth between clusters to compare what’s happening, but with all the extra Navigation noise right now, I can’t get passed to the rest of your changes. It’s too unwieldy to even try to get used to!
We are working on related improvements. I’ll keep you updated when there is something to test.
