111–120 of 235 posts
Semi-related: Has WSL2 fixed the issue where trying to do anything in the host Windows filesystem is interminably slow? Running something like “git status” takes legitimately like 15 seconds if the repo is outside the linux filesystem.
Is 7zip really a good format for sharing data? I also use the program for unpacking and I like the context menu integration. However when I send files, I prefer zip because I feel like this is easiest for the recipient to open (no matter if they are using windows, linux, osx, Android...).
I'll replace WinDirStat with WizTree. It loads immediately because of reading local disk MFT.
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Any upsides to scoop compared to chocolatey?
Scoop installs all the files locally by default and doesn't need to be run through an elevated shell. In junction to this, there's also usually less trouble with leftover files after uninstalling programs. The official software repo might be smaller than chocolate's, but to my eye, as it is moderated through a single open github repo, it seems much simpler.
I wonder if improving this is possible within the current design of Windows or if it would be a fundamental change in how it handles user privileges.
would like to have seen a debloater / unfudger on the list but am guessing they haven't progressed much
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Any upsides to scoop compared to chocolatey?
I'd not heard of Scoop before today but have used chocolatey extensively in the past. However I'm wary of all these tools (including brew on Mac) as they all feel like a pretty efficient way to main line your own personal supply chain attack into your dev machine! For that reason I now try to use them sparingly and with a high degree of suspicion.
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I think that Microsoft just don't care.
That’s sort of my take as well. I can’t think of a single Windows program that would wish was available to me on the Mac or Linux. You never hear a company advertising that their product is only feasable thanks to the features provided in the .Net framework, or that their application takes advantage of the foundation provided by Windows. I not saying that Windows is bad, it’s a truck, meant for business, and games. I…
> You never hear a company advertising that their product is only feasable thanks to the features provided in the .Net framework...
Yes you do. There are whole companies (and publications) that only exist thanks to the .NET framework and before that, Visual Basic. How many "Swift/Obj-C component companies" are there? On the .NET side I can count at least 2 big ones off the top of my head (DevExpress and Telerik), but I'm probably forgetting dozens more from decades past.
If these companies and their customers were already being served by Java or Obj-C then .NET would never have taken off.
Outside of the .NET components business, there is a whole class of applications which would be extremely difficult to develop and maintain on Mac and Linux. Programs like TortoiseGit which heavily customize the Windows Explorer and other bits of the Windows UI in ways which Apple would never provide APIs for. On Linux, to develop apps like these you'd have cover to much of the fragmented landscape of desktop environments. I still miss TortoiseGit on my Linux desktop.
AutoHotKey is also in another class of apps that I can't see existing for Mac or Linux. Automating Win32 is easy because you can hook into everything and there's a stable, unfragmented landscape. Here's something I recently did with AutoHotKey - created a 2 line script that waited for a "HID key/Special key/Media key" to be pressed and ran a program. On a Mac you'll be writing a whole custom program or hunting down an obscure utility. On Linux, you'll cobble together a few different programs depending on your DE setup. On my Mac, I had trouble even finding a program [0] that would show me what keyboard keys were pressed so I could use the key id in my script, like this - https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/KeyList.htm#SpecialKeys
> I not saying that Windows is bad, it’s a truck, meant for business, and games.
It's a general purpose OS, just like Mac and Linux. If Windows is a truck, all three of them are trucks.
> It’s just that there aren’t any overwhelming programs which could only exist on Windows.
What kinds of programs do you think could only exist on a Mac or Linux which could not possibly work on Windows?
> Many programs don’t even feel completly native to the platform, and basic features like drag’n drop, copy’n paste or shortcut are frequently a little hit and miss, it have become much better, but still, it’s a little late.
Not sure specifically what you're talking about here. But - a little late for what? The vast majority of desktop users and more than half of all programmers are already on Windows.
I've never had problems with basic features like cut/copy/paste or window management on Windows. On my Mac I've given up on trying to fix the lack of window management features and the inability to do things with keyboard like "pressing just delete to delete a file". On my main workstations I had to cobble together various scripts and obscure utilities to do things Windows does, such as "use this hotkey to move window to other monitor" (for XFCE).
> Visual Code is a fantastic product...
It's called Visual Studio Code or VS Code.
> ...it’s not really a Windows application. That sort of tells me that not ever Microsoft really believe that Windows have that much to offer on the desktop...
Nah, they built VS Code as part of their expansion into cloud services so they could market those services to Mac and Linux programmers more easily. Electron is just the path of least resistance for building cross-platform apps. They couldn't use Windows-only tech to build it because of course Windows-only tech is a bad way to build cross-platform apps.
[0] - Just found this today, but note the comment on the second answer that "it doesn't work for media keys" which was my problem. Also, the first answer doesn't show you key codes just highlights the key being pressed. - https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/40192/how-can-i-te...
[1] - Not sure what Core ML can do that ML.NET cannot but here's an article highlighting a company using ML.NET - https://sigparser.com/developers/email-parsing/sentiment-ana...
[2] More here - https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/machinelearning-ai/ml-dotn...
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Winget is the de facto official package manager for Windows. It is or will be included with Windows. I know it’s included in the Insider builds.
It is a mess though, and quite incapable.
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/blob/master/doc/wind...
Does anyone have a tool that can do "grep like" searches on a folder of text docs from windows explorer? Right click shelling out and using the FIND command is what I've resorted to so far. =(
On the command line, I just use grep (a cygwin version of it, installed with Git for Windows, I think).