Warp wrote:
>   I'm just not very eager to spend something like 200 euros on a Windows
> which does things that my *current* Windows should do already (if nothing
> else, as a free upgrade).

I didn't ask you to. :-)

>   I have used Windows (98 and newer) for over 10 years, and I still can't
> figure out how to do such things.

Like what, grep?  I already pointed you to Agent Ransack, and I've found 
that putting "win32" on the front of a query usually gives you back the 
ported version of that software.

> I have been using Unix-likes for about
> the same amount of time, and it didn't take me long to figure out, and it
> just feels comfortable. (I'm not saying that you can do every possible
> operation in existence easily, but common tasks just are much easier there
> than in Windows, where often I don't know even where to start, even though
> I'm not exactly a newbie. Windows is just that good at hiding all the stuff.)

Yeah.  I sat down and read thru all the V7 man pages and source code, so I 
know how the basics of UNIX works. I never did that with Windows. When I 
want to do something complex, like rename all my new photographs based on 
the camera that took them combined with the EXIF date, I write a program to 
do that, just like I would in Linux. I don't use Windows like a regular user 
does, because I'm a programmer.  So I have added the tools a programmer 
uses.  These programs are not always well-advertised, and are often 
distributed as part of "an SDK" which really doesn't tell you what's there.

There are a number of tasks I do frequently that I have little scripted 
programs to do.

Similarly, people look at me funny when I say I don't use facebook, 
linkedin, etc. But that's not the sort of thing I do.  I imagine someone 
working in an HR department has all different kinds of programs and scripts 
and macros to use their Windows conveniently than I do.

If there's something you want to do on Windows that's hard to do, it's 
probably because that's not how it's done on Windows. Just as an example, I 
have never seen a soft link used in Windows, or seen the need for a soft 
link other than to fix broken programs that hard-coded file names that they 
were supposed to be pulling out of the environment. People don't use soft 
links to point to the right location - they use configuration variables.

The whole "file format" issue is exactly that. People don't try to implement 
programs that can create Excel files or pull information out of Word files 
on Windows, any more than they write programs that can part MyISAM files on 
Linux. They talk to the program that knows the format through a well defined 
interface to manipulate the files in an upward-compatible way.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

Post a reply to this message