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Cairo Desktop Environment

cairoshell.com

71–80 of 90 posts

Re: Cairo Desktop Environment

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use keypiranha as well. Great tool! > it's a pity they don't use the 100 times faster WizFile 100 times faster? Everything is instant for me, never had any kind of delay. What things are slow enough with it that something else could be faster?

Indexing. Everything traverses your folders to find everything and make an index from that, WizFile reads this from some hard drive tables directly. So the first indexing with everything takes maybe 30 minutes or more (I actually have no Idea how long it took exactly..) and wizfile is done in under a minute. With slower drives (e.g. external USB2) the difference should be even more dramatic. The only downside appart…

JFYI, SwiftSearch has Regex functons and it is (on NTFS of course) as fast as a search tool can be:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/?source=dlp

Re: Cairo Desktop Environment

#72
post #54

Has anyone actually tried this? I'm curious but if I don't like it and uninstall it I'm afraid of weird glitchy behaviors and a broken shell and I really don't feel like reinstalling Windows right now.

Perhaps you could install it with Windows Sandbox. Low risk.

I’ll really put it to the test in Parallels and see how it plays with their integrations.

Re: Cairo Desktop Environment

#73
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but I can't tap a keyboard letter to jump down the list Works for me: Win key, down arrow to get into list (otherwise it will search everything), typing a letter jumps to that letter. Bonus tip, sometimes useful: Ctrl+arrows resizes start menu. Candy Crush Slot Machine Simular Redux That sucks, yes, but right-click + uninstall seems to get rid of it once and for all.

Great advice, I didn't know that way to search the list

This is probably different than what you want but just in case...

I almost always do Ctrl+s to search and type a few letters of the program I want.

Re: Cairo Desktop Environment

#74
For the record, you can add custom folders to your toolbar. Since Windows 95 I've found it useful to have Desktop and Downloads there, so you can quickly access stuff. I only use those folders plus one root for projects, so don't really have this problem of getting lost in various folders or regularly needing Explorer.

Re: Cairo Desktop Environment

#75
post #45
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you pin them on the taskbar you can launch them with win + x in the order you have pinned them. I’m assuming that’s why the other person asked.

I didn't know this was possible, thanks!

shift-win-# opens a new instance/window of an app that is already open, and alt-win-# closes that app (which can be sorta weird with multiple windows of an app open.)

Re: Cairo Desktop Environment

#76
post #74

For the record, you can add custom folders to your toolbar. Since Windows 95 I've found it useful to have Desktop and Downloads there, so you can quickly access stuff. I only use those folders plus one root for projects, so don't really have this problem of getting lost in various folders or regularly needing Explorer.

I used to love this once, when you're a child it feels like hacking, like forcing Windows to have a second start menu (if you make the new toolbar small enough, the folder contents appear as a menu).

Re: Cairo Desktop Environment

#77
post #36

Wow! This is awesome! I really did think Windows 10 removed most customization capabilities. Glad I thought wrong. This seems like WindowBlinds [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowBlinds ] for 2020. Ah, XP with transparency... memories :)

Oh boy, Windows Blinds were the thing for Windows XP. Longhorn theme for Windows XP? Remember Windows Blackcomb theme? I also remember customizing msgina.dll :)

One could also use the built-in visual style engine by patching uxtheme.dll or by using StyleXP which patched it in RAM

Re: Cairo Desktop Environment

#78
post #76
post #74

For the record, you can add custom folders to your toolbar. Since Windows 95 I've found it useful to have Desktop and Downloads there, so you can quickly access stuff. I only use those folders plus one root for projects, so don't really have this problem of getting lost in various folders or regularly needing Explorer.

I used to love this once, when you're a child it feels like hacking, like forcing Windows to have a second start menu (if you make the new toolbar small enough, the folder contents appear as a menu).

Yeah, you have to fiddle a bit to get them to minimum width with the ">>" menu and no extra space. Obvious search is more or less good enough now, but you still can't drag from the start menu.

Re: Cairo Desktop Environment

#79
post #5

I wonder if the name is inspired by this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)

Probably. Or possibly by Windows Chi-Rho (the same source of the name of the city “Cairo”), which is more popularly known by the English names of those letters, which is often looked at as the peak of Windows UX with later iterations as regressions (though sometimes Windows 7 gets that honor.)

Chi-Rho is not at all the source of the name of the city Cairo.

Cairo was founded by the Fatimid's and called al-Qāhirah, and this is the etymology of the anglicisation.

Re: Cairo Desktop Environment

#80
post #4

It looks rather interesting. I didn't realize Windows 10 was hackable enough to do this. The name made me think of the Cairo graphics drawling library initially.

I was sad when shell replacements stopped being as much of a thing; all the way back to Windows 3 and up to ar least Windows XP there were well designed alternatives to the default Windows shell environment. A good example of an early one is Norton Shell for Windows: http://toastytech.com/guis/ndw.html Then later there were things such as LiteStep, bbZero and even KDE at a time. Personally, I actually used ReactOS sh…

Do you know what changed recently? The last one I used with an alternative shell was windows 2k and the shells replaced shell.exe. is that not doable these days?
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