Improving the Windows XP User Interface?

Pimpin' Up Windows asks: "Many of us are forced to live with Windows XP for our day-to-day computing needs - at work, home or school - and longingly look to the not only beautiful, but functional and efficient, Mac OS X 'Aqua' user interface. Apart from just themes, what would be Slashdot reader's suggestions for improving the user interface of XP? What changes, add-ons and other improvements could further enhance its usability?"

Comments

Win XP Power Toys

[waynegoode]

Win XP Power Toys, which is free.

There are some good ones here. I like:

• Open Command Window Here, opens a command prompt window at the path of the current window
• Alt-Tab Replacement, see more when you use alt-tab to switch apps
• Tweak UI, which does a lot of things
• Virtual Desktop Manager, manage up to four desktops, a feature from others UIs that is missing in Windows

Re:Win XP Power Toys

[Chop]

I have tried this, and found it seriously lacking. Windows was not designed for this sort of thing, and software, in general, does not know how to handle it. I have found that it is unstable, and it is impossible to move windows from one desktop to another.

I currently use Enhanced Vitual Desktops available from on Windows2000 SP4 and have had no problems moving windows between desktops. I have had explorer.exe crash and all the tray icons disappear and EVD is still running along fine, switching desktops brings the tray icon back. I have switched terminal windows, putty sessions, Outlook, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird windows without issues.

Chop

Re:Win XP Power Toys

[Synbiosis]

You know you can change it yourself, right?

Just Right-click on program files and choose open.. Then you can create a folder called 'Media Players' and pop WinAMP, Realplayer, foobar2000, etc.. into there, one called 'internet' with Thunderbird, Firefox, IM clients, etc... It's what I do, and my program files takes up no more than 1/8th of my screen @ 1024x768.

Re:Win XP Power Toys

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

FWIW, I can second this. The local computer store we bought our office PCs from for a while happened to be installing a video card with a second port. Once when we upgraded a few people there were some spare 17" monitors lying around, and one of the guys tried hooking it up to his XP box to see how Windows coped with a second screen. The answer was that it coped very well, as did the applications in almost all cases, and he (and now several other colleagues) became an instant convert. Having a real second monitor makes using virtual desktops feel like the cheap hack it basically is.

Those of us who got stuck with corporate standard clone Dell boxen, which have a really cheap video card without the second port, are suitably impressed. ;-)

Virtual Desktops

[christophe.vg]

using VirtuaWin

Re:I've got an idea!

[skadus]

A patched uxtheme.dll and about 2 or 3 minutes at DeviantArt will clear that right up.

I agree, though. Luna and Royale look godawful. I'd love to see them recruit a better artist for some themes later on. Maybe they can make a cool Sci-Fi theme that looks like the one in Minority Report (just saw it this weekend, otherwise I'd think of a better movie/interface design).

Use the system, don't fight it.

[Elwood P Dowd]

If you go installing a ton of crap on your Windows machine, then you won't learn how to use Windows on everyone else's machine, which works pretty damn well. Learn the system, and it's not too bad. It blew my mind once when Anand of Anandtech tried to claim that MacOS X had better keyboard shortcuts than Windows. I love MacOS, but Windows has keyboard accessibility completely nailed.

What Microsoft has done:

Windows-D hides all your apps.

Windows-R brings up the run window.

The only things I've changed:

ctrl-alt-g puts focus in the Google Deskbar.

The Google Deskbar is a part of a side-docked not always-on-top toolbar with my quicklaunch & desktop, with large icons that I can use like a dock. So no matter where I am, ctrl-alt-g gives me access to the stuff I don't want cluttering my taskbar.

If it's always-on-top, then you can't use fitts the way that XP is designed for, which is fantastic.

I'm pretty happy with the setup. My only complaint with Windows is that the text-editing shortcuts aren't the same as MacOS, so my fingers do all the wrong things when I'm typing on either system. Both operating systems have passable text-editing key commands, I just can't learn either one since they're different. If only they both had emacs-mode, I'd just learn it the emacs way.

Anyway, here's a picture of how it works out for me on xp. That's what it looks like when I've popped up my toolbar with ctrl-alt-g.

Re:Use the system, don't fight it.

[larien]

Couple of others:

Windows-E - bring up explorer window
Windows-M - Minimise all windows (seems to be same as Windows-D which I didn't know about).

Re:Use the system, don't fight it.

[Elwood P Dowd]

Windows-D is a toggle. Hitting it a second time brings everything back.

Re:Use the system, don't fight it.

[stevey]

I've always used the state-shortcuts instead:

Windows + m == Minimize all apps.

Windows + Shift + m == Revert the minimization.

I guess I've learnt that Windows+D is easier to reverse though!

Re:Use the system, don't fight it.

[CAR912]

Alt+Enter seems to work pretty good to get an object/file's properties.

Ctrl+escape for the start menu (or the wonderful windows key)

I always use alt+tab, alt+space n, and windows+d as well.

Perhaps it is alt+F4 so people don't accidentally hit it and then go "oh sh*t, what have I done?"

Re:Use the system, don't fight it.

[jpop32]

A few that I find very useful:

F2 - rename an object
alt-enter - open properties tab

Re:Start button doesn't stay in the bottom left

[NanoGator]

"Make it NOT look like froofy pastel crap that makes people violently ill!"

If you right click in there, you can access the toolbar access stuff without bringing up the properties of that particular icon. That's not to say I disagree with you, but rather just pointing out that it's not completely 100% useless. (That's typically where I go when I either need the task manager or to unlock the taskbar.)

Re:Stop interrupting me!

[doctormetal]

It shouldn't be possible for a dialog box, especially one from another application, to steal keyboard focus.

It is really annoying, but you can prevent an application from stealing focus. It is a setting in tweakui.

2600 has already covered this

[StarWynd]

A while back there was an article in 2600 about how to "Hack the Look" of Windows. Take a look at the articles here and here.

Strokeit and Trip

[FrenZon]

I find stroke-it to be invaluable after some jigging of the default settings. It's a mouse-gesture recognition system, and can be configured to do just about anything (although I mainly use it for open browser, open explorer and close window.

I also use trip regularly, but I wrote it, so I'm quite biased.

Things I can't live without...

[phallstrom]

Putty for SSH
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

CTRL-CAPS Lock Switcher
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/ctrl2cap. shtml

Re:thats all??

[TechnoPops]

* it seems you can't modify the big shortcut buttons on the left hand side of the dialog to point somewhere useful.

Download the TweakUI PowerToy. It let's you change those to whatever you like.

* you can't directly type in the directory you want.

Sure you can. Just put your cursor in the file name box and type away. It'll even autocomplete for you.

* there is no way of entering a custom "filter by filetype" pattern. (eg. *.py)

Ditto with this. Type *.py in the file name box, hit enter, and all your Python files will only show up.

And on a related note

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Also check out the many useful tools available from SysInternals. These guys are serious Windows hackers and know how to integrate tightly with the internals. For general use, Process Explorer is a must-have replacement for task manager, and many of the others are useful if you're working in the areas they concern. And they give them away free, and a fair bit of source code too, bless them.

Re:I've got an idea!

[timothv]

You can make the titlebars smaller in the Display/Appearance tab.

Re:Consistency and Integratioin.

[Jherico]

In fact, why do zip files act nothing like regular folders at all when explorer presents them as if they are.

Because zip folders are a new feature and aren't as polished as everything else.

Why does MS-Office _always_ have a totally different look and feel to any existing windows version at the time of its release?

Well, that's hardly a failing of the OS is it? But in point of fact, the release cycle of Office, arguably one of the most used applications on windows besides IE and games, allows the microsoft team to experiment with additional UI polishing efforts. You'll frequently notice the well recieved changes in Office finding their way in to the next version of Windows.

Why can I use windows networking paths [...] not in cmd.exe?

In point of fact you can. If I say 'copy \\server\share\foo.txt c:\' it will work fine, as long as I'm able to authenticate against that share. Granted, you can't change to a network directory unless you mount it somewhere, but I'm pretty sure that's the case on Mac and Unix as well.

Microsoft loves to introduce an idea - and then not follow through with a complete and useful implementation,

This is actually a common problem with developing features in software. You can make a feature, and you can decide its not popular enough to not warrant further effort, but got help you if you ever remove a feature. When you add a feature to software, keep that in mind, because somewhere out there, no matter how bad the feature is, will love it, use it, and scream bloody murder and never upgrade again if you remove it.