In the name of balance (geekery, job stuff)
by at 6:45 PM
Okay, so it's been pretty well-established that I dislike Windows. But there are some positive points as well:
- My builds are much faster. This of course isn't really anything to do with Windows directly, but now that I don't have to rsync my source tree from the host OS to the client OS, that cuts a few minutes out of my build cycle (not to mention all the time that's wasted by things getting rebuilt when rsync updates the timestamp even on unchanged files), and of course the tools themselves run a lot faster as well since the hard disk is no longer emulated.
- My morning startup and evening shutdown are much quicker. This has little to do with Windows and more to do with the fact that the MacBook doesn't have a proper docking station, whereas my Windows laptop (a Sony Vaio) does. The docking station does have some quirks to it (in that you have to be careful that it's safe to undock or else the system completely freezes), but it's nice just being able to drop my laptop on the dock in the morning and that's the entirety of the setup, rather than having to plug in a whole bunch of cables in a particular order (to prevent network services and the monitor and so on from being detected weirdly), and just pressing a button and removing it in the evening. This morning was the first time I had a purely dock-based startup, and after step 1 I couldn't figure out what to do next because I kept thinking there had to be steps 2-5.
- Thunderbird still isn't as slick as Mail.app. There's no unified "every inbox" view like what Mail.app has. So far that hasn't been a big deal, though, and on the plus side it does have an "unread folders" view which is actually quite nice. Also, its offline operation stuff isn't as transparent and is kinda, well, weird.
- Pidgin's notifications... well, aren't as bad as they are on Linux as on Windows, but still aren't nearly as good as they are on OSX. On the plus side, the replacement theme I'm using works well with Pidgin's "highlight the taskbar button" notification mode (which is actually called "flash the window" for some reason), so while it's not quite as obvious as a nice red dot on an easy-to-see dock icon, it sure beats just having a teeny 5-pixel change in the systray like what ucblockhead has to put up with on Linux. Although, even then sometimes things get lost. It'd be nice if it were to continuously flash the systray icon or something. Maybe there's a plugin to do that.
- I really wish there were something like Aquamacs for Windows. The native port of XEmacs is still very not-at-all-integrated-into-the-UI, and as much as I dislike the Windows UI, at least it's better than the circa-1989 view of X11 that XEmacs still subscribes to. I can't fault it entirely, though, seeing as how the reason Aquamacs can integrate so well is that the MacOS-specific keys don't conflict at all with the UNIXy keys, whereas on Windows you're stuck with Meta and Alt being the same key (because that nice big juicy Windows key isn't really usable by individual apps in general).
- Hotplugged monitors don't behave nearly so nicely on Windows as they do on OSX, especially as they relate to having my taskbar on the right instead of the bottom. (I cannot abide a bottom-mounted taskbar with the number of windows and disparate apps I'm running at any given time, especially since then that pretty much forces you to have a collapsed systray — which makes a lot of stuff disappear that shouldn't, while completely useless stuff insists on always being visible — and also doesn't give me any nice place for the WorkRave applet.)
Comments
Also, I think one of the plugins that comes with Pidgin will let you set it to continue flashing in the taskbar indefinitely, but I can't think what it is and I remember the option itself in the plugin being really poorly named. If you still haven't found it, I'll try to remember to take a look for it on Monday morning when I'm in front of a Windows machine again.
mashuren: Huh, TweakUI didn't have an option for that the last time I looked at it. Thanks.
re: pidgin... I wish Windows has a nice notification system like Growl, but the only alternatives that I know are Snarl and a Growl clone.
Not sure if you've tried out Textmate for Mac (for Emacs too), but there's a Windows alternative that's Textmate compatible called E Text Editor.
Just thought I'd throw these out there.
There's multiple monitor utilities available for Windows, but I don't know how well they work, as the only time I've used multi-monitors much, I've been an unpriviliged user. They say they help with taskbars.
As for Emacs, I don't know how to help as I've got a messed up installation. Although it is possible to remap the Caps Lock key to be Control (sysinternals.com lets you do it) on a global scale. Out of interest, what is the Alt key (rather than Meta) used for in Emacs? I never noticed the difference when I moved from Solaris to Windows.
Also on the Emacs front, what do you do about time consuming re-indents or searches locking up the UI? Is your computer fast enough to ignore it?
Do you know how Windows Live Mail compares to Mail.app? Unfortunately the big selling point on the site is that it'll be "familiar to Outlook users" but personally I think Outlook's UI is pretty shitty.
The thing about Snarl is that it doesn't really have a lot of app support. It's nice that it hooks into the notification-area popup thing but Pidgin (for example) doesn't use that. Also, Growl-type notifications aren't really useful for what I'm talking about here; while it does a good job of notifying you when an event happens, it doesn't do a very good job of notifying you that an unhandled event happened some time in the past (which the OSX Dock is very good at). The Windows systray would be a contender if it weren't so terribly overused by everything else.
ambrosen:
The very first thing I do with any Windows system (or any other system for that matter) is to remap capslock to ctrl.
The 'alt' vs. 'meta' terminology is a bit confusing and inconsistent. Generally, the 'alt' key is used as Emacs' 'meta' keysym. This is the case on Linux/X11, Windows, and MacOS. The difference is that on the Mac, keyboard commands are generally performed with the Cmd key (which some people still call the 'apple' key even though Apple is moving away from it, and former Apple II users often still call it 'open apple' since Apple II had a 'closed apple' key as well). So, as a result, the Mac version of Emacs can still map common actions (open, save, close, etc.) to the Cmd key since they don't conflict with Emacs' 'meta' function which is mapped to the Alt key.
The opposite-but-somewhat-equal approach that I've seen on Linux is X11 generally maps Win to Meta and Alt to Alt (and uses Alt for window manager functions). The funny thing is that while the keys are mapped backwards, they're also placed backwards relative to a Mac keyboard as well. Also, since Emacs in X11 actually differentiates between Alt and Meta, you can easily bind Alt-key functions to various commands.
Where it falls down in Windows is that the Win key isn't really available for apps to use.
I have never had trouble with re-indents or searches locking up the UI, except on very large files, but if your files are getting large enough for it to be a problem you probably should learn to use separate source files for different things.
1) right-click on the taskbar, choose "properties"
2) check "Hide inactive icons" at the bottom, click on "Customize..."
3) choose your preferences for each application-- make sure to check both "Current Items" and "Past Items" for duplicates of things that have registered as separate icons because of the tooltip name changing to reflect statuses and whatnot
4) Hit OK a few times!
The re-indenting locking up the UI was a while back, using JDEE, which is a pretty heavyweight mode to be using on the computer I was on, with source files under 1000 lines. Certainly it's not a problem I've been coming across in my recent light Emacs use. As for search, it was using incremental search in things like large postscript files or corpora, so probably not an option to split them up.
Anyway, your endorsement's certainly got me looking at getting a nice Emacs setup for the projects I'm getting going on. I was going to try to learn Eclipse, but that does sound a little heavy.