implements Elegance {

If a MS Windows user asks “How can I be more productive?“, most people I know (including me) would respond “Stop using Windows! Duh!” and then look a little smug. However, not everyone has control of the environment that they work with. So here‘s the less smug, more useful answer — according to me.

People who work for small companies or for themselves have a high degree of control over their chosen environment. In this scenario you can indeed decide to dump windows and use a distro of Linux or – budget allowing – one of those nice looking Macs.

However, many people – like me since I started my new job – work in a large corporation that use MS Windows PCs and who will probably find a lot of resistance to the use of any other platform (I have to admit I have not tried however). Well, we have to be a little more inventive about how we improve our work environment.

I hasten to add – before anyone reads on – that I have no extensive experience of Vista. Free (well not exactly free) stuff in vista might make the cool apps below obsolete for all I know.

Launchy.

Launchy is a keystroke application launcher that is probably inspired by Quicksilver.

A keystroke launcher is a must. If you‘re not pushing pixels about or gaming, your hand is usually nowhere near your mouse. Both hands are busy tapping away on the keyboard. Most applications have keyboard shortcuts for a reason and that is because it‘s quicker to tap out a key-combination than it is to move your hand all those vast centimetres to your mouse, navigate your mouse to a location on the screen (then back again because you overshot). There is probably scientific research to support this wild assertion.

The Start Menu is not fit for purpose in my opinion and Windows does not have a flexible enough keyboard shortcut system to do this, so I use Launchy.

I‘m used to using Gnome-Do in Gnome, on Ubuntu and continue to do so at home. This is also very similar to Quicksilver. Both Launchy and Gnome-Do are trainable so you can associate any string with any application, it becomes a very personalised interaction with your PC.

Use Launchy for a week and you‘ll never look back. Other options are Enso and Executor, though I haven‘t tried these.

Cygwin.

Doing anything on the command line with just a modicum of productivity or trying to script anything with any elegance is the biggest productivity nightmare for me using Windows.

I realise that many Windows users will have stayed well away from the command shell. With good reason — it sucks! The way command history works is rubbish. The range of commands available and the scope of their functionality is limited. Batch files look ugly and that isn‘t the worst of it. Batch files don‘t even allow for functions (though it is possible to simulate them) and the only way to jump around the script is to use GOTO!! GOTO FFS!?

The existence of GOTO in programming languages has caused some of the biggest maintainability problems for software developers. It remains the only way to jump/transfer execution in Windows batch files. Oh and one other thing, you can‘t resize the window horizontally with the mouse! Now that‘s just lazy!

With Cygwin installed, you get the wonders of a *nix shell and all the those oh–so useful tools (grep, less, cat, sed, awk, joe, xargs …). If you don‘t know what I‘m talking about, you‘re missing out.

Cygwin is far too big a beast for me to even start covering the advantages here. One tip I will volunteer is that you make sure you include rxvt when you install Cygwin. Then, replace the contents of your c:\cygwin\cygwin.bat with the following:

This will give you a decent looking shell window that will resize in any direction.

There appear to be alternatives to Cygwin but I have not heard of them. One thing I have tried is running Linux on a virtual machine – it gets tedious after a while.

Textpad.

What I miss most – now that I use Windows for work – is a decent text editor. I‘m not going to write much about Textpad, the truth is it‘s not a patch on Gedit or Textmate (non-free) but it's the best that is available as far as I know. If anyone knows of anything better, I'd love to know about it.

Conclusion

The fact that there are only three things I could really recommend to make Windows a more pleasurable and productive environment – I think – indicates one of three things.

1. Windows isn‘t all that far from being a decent platform
2. There are a load more gems out there that will improve my Windows experience that I haven‘t found yet.
3. Windows is beyond rescue and we should all use a decent operating system (I really should give Vista a good try before I say things like that)

One thing I missed out from the above list which should probably be included is AnthaBounce but it's not free and I have no intention of buying it for a company workstation.