111–120 of 336 posts
Many of these things come out of the box on a Linux distro : Always on top, color picker, File explorer add-ons, keyboard manager, "mouse utilities" and "the Powertoys run" (a poor imitation of krunner could do)
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This reminds me of one of my favorite features from the Mac: Quick Look — press space to instantly bring up a big contextual preview window of the selected document in the Finder. You can bring it to Windows with this useful open source tool: https://github.com/QL-Win/QuickLook
At least windows explorer has some great extension utilities like File Menu Tools; a tool that can be configured to cover pretty much every file explorer extension usecase you can imagine. OSX and XDG (Gnome etc...) based systems have nothing close last time I checked.
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
(EDIT: I was "posting too fast". In the meantime, I think that jasomills has pointed this out (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31305652).)
Of course you could argue that you always have to be very careful not to overload and bloat your software product, especially if it's an OS — but windows contains two different consoles, about three versions of the system preferences management, ..., it just doesn't seem like MSFT to be that picky about what they'll put into their product.
Many, if not most of these tools contain functionality that is built into other major OSes, and had been for a long time. I don't really understand why Microsoft doesn't include them by default.
I actually think it's bad for an OS to include too many features out of the box. Basically every modern platform has already gone too far in this direction, making computers more difficult for casual users to understand. Vendors should include only the bare essentials, then let users who want more add their own extras. Imagine an OS similar to the original Macintosh, or maybe early versions of iOS, but with add-ons t…
This used to be appealing to me, back when the open-source model seemed to be viable even on macOS and Windows. Now any look at the app store will show you apps performing the most basic, should-be (and often is!) bundled, functionality that cost $5 apiece. No slight against developers, who have a right to make a living, but if I just dropped thousands of dollars on a computer and then had to pay $5 for each small convenience feature I wanted, it would definitely be a significant downgrade in experience. I don't live in the Windows ecosystem any more, but the macOS freeware ecosystem has significantly degraded (and it's not just a matter of “I have to use something old”—due to architecture changes, most of the old stuff doesn't work any more, and, understandably, even if the original maintainer is still keeping it up, they now often charge for the product).
This reminds me of one of my favorite features from the Mac: Quick Look — press space to instantly bring up a big contextual preview window of the selected document in the Finder. You can bring it to Windows with this useful open source tool: https://github.com/QL-Win/QuickLook
Yes! Love this for Windows, there are plugins for it too, similar to the plugins for macOS. Like you, QuickLook is one of my favorite and most-used macOS features and I cannot be on a system without it. Between this project and PowerToys, the Windows experience is a lot more enjoyable. PowerToys Run especially (essentially Alfred or QuickSilver for Windows), is much faster and better than standard Win-S searches.
These are great, but with some of them I cannot help but wonder why MSFT would choose not to include them in the OS by default. They seem fairly unobtrusive and like they wouldn't add too much complexity to the product in return for what you get in terms of better usability and/or additional functionality. Of course you could argue that you always have to be very careful not to overload and bloat your software produc…
This PowerTools has something close but not exactly what I’m looking for.
I’ve gotten used to PTT in apps like Ventrilo / Discord and hate having to constantly unmute / remute in Teams.
These are great, but with some of them I cannot help but wonder why MSFT would choose not to include them in the OS by default. They seem fairly unobtrusive and like they wouldn't add too much complexity to the product in return for what you get in terms of better usability and/or additional functionality. Of course you could argue that you always have to be very careful not to overload and bloat your software produc…