Making Windows bearable

by Daniel R
in Articles

tagged windows, desktop

So, in a strange turn of fate I'm using Windows as my day job desktop for the first time in about 25 years. The last time was 1999, and it was a Pentium II 660MHz running Windows NT 4.

A few things have changed since then, I dare say.

I had a brief spell using a Mac (Unix but pretty?), but I really didn't like it much. More later, maybe.

So, going from my usual desktop (XFCE) to Windows 11 was going to be a bit of an adjustment. I made a list of the things I was really used to from Linux:

  • Focus-follows-mouse
  • Caps-lock remapped to control, keyboard shortcuts
  • Open window search (type-ahead task switcher)
  • Zim desktop wiki
  • Virtual desktops
  • Mouse customizations (more later)

Mac complaints

A tiny detour about mac desktop issues. I used to use an ibook/macbook around the 10.3 era (2002?) and quite liked it, but between then and 2018 the usability seemed to take a real hit. I couldn't quite describe what was off about it, but reading a few articles a year-or-so later, it occurred to me that the screens had got a lot larger between 2002 and 2018, and mac mouse-acceleration didn't work as well any more. I was finding with the Mac that it was taking four or five swipes of the trackball to get the mouse cursor from one side of the screen to the other, and if I turned the mouse speed up I could no longer reliably hit the very small buttons on the screen.

Additionally, the time taken for quarter-to-half second animations on things (or even 0.1 seconds to draw the shadows on the active window) made the system feel unresponsive or laggy.

So, back to windows.

Focus follows mouse

In the mouse accessibility settings, there is a setting to hover over windows to activate them. The only issue here is a short delay before activation occurs (fixable with a slider), and that the newly activated window will be raised to the top. The latter is fixable with a registry tweak.

Caps-lock remapped to control, keyboard shortcuts

Enter PowerToys: named after a set of customizations for the original Windows 95, these are additional utilities for customizing Windows. Included in here is a keyboard remapper (and a whole bunch of other helpful tools). Caps lock is easily remapped to left-control, and other windows-standard keys are remappable to the set of shortcuts I'm used to from my Linux desktop.

  • Win+[, Win+]: tile window left/right. Was Win+Left/Win+Right.
  • Win+O: maximize window
  • Win+I: maximize vertically (window width unchanged).
  • Win+Q: close window
  • Win+Left/Right: switch task

... and many, many others.

For more advanced window layout and tiling, PowerToys has FancyZones. I got on reasonably well just using Win11's tiling features alone (Win+Z).

Launching applications was fairly straightforward - on Linux, I'd define shortcut keys for Win+Fn to launch my usual favourite apps, but the windows taskbar provides Win+n to launch pinned apps from the task bar. Good enough.

Open-window search

Powertoys has a pretty versatile type-to-search utility built-in (PowerToys Run), which has many, many plugins which could be reduced to just open windows. I was looking for something a little simpler, and found another utility: Switcheroo.

Zim desktop wiki

Zim has a windows port, no problem there.

Virtual desktops

Windows does (at long last) have virtual desktops. I used to use VirtuaWin on Windows 98/NT. The only downside is there aren't any keyboard shortcuts to go directly to a specific desktop, only to switch to next/previous. I find that I use fewer virtual desktops on Windows, so it's not too much of a problem.

Mouse customization

I use a Logitech marble trackball, and on Linux I'd get scroll-wheel functionality using an evdev flag which changes the marble to a scroll wheel while one of the buttons is held down. The official Logitech software on Windows doesn't provide a very good equivalent, but XMBC provides this exact functionality and some other really convenient features that I'm gradually incorporating.

XMBC also provides Alt+Left drag and Alt+right drag to move/resize windows, which I missed very sorely on OSX.

Remaining windows annoyances

Of course, there are too many to list in any one article, but a few highlights that are strange from someone who has only used free desktops for the last 20+ years

  • Why are there four different control panel apps?
  • Why do I have two folders named "Documents" in my home folder, and why does only one show up in the open/save dialog?
  • Color theme customization is too limited (Win3.1 let you change everything, but in Win11 you can only really pick an accent color)

My favourite windows version is still Windows 3.11. They've never topped it for usability or UI consistency, but stability has improved thankfully.