5 ms·

Certainly not for me. Registry was one of the worst parts of the Windows experience for me; but I understand it can be subjective. With separate files, the abi

by jeswin 5y ago

Certainly not for me. Registry was one of the worst parts of the Windows experience for me; but I understand it can be subjective. With separate files, the ability to download and replace them individually is a big win. Also, I can use terminal tools on them which is great for automation.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dboreham 5y ago
Registry never made much sense on the local system: just use the filesystem. I assume there was once a plan to use it in a networked fashion. But Active Directory replaced it for that purpose.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  The filesystem isn't inherently bad, but the lack of a standard config format, location, and APIs is quite terrible. There's no reason a thousand programs should have a thousand different ways to be configured, it's just a legacy of poor design with no standardization.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    Actually there is a standard location for user settings: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-... Dconf complements it: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/dconf https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/dconf and dconf-editor is even similar to regedit. For system settings... that is a bit more complicated.
  - tenebrisalietum 5y ago
    It's not poor design because it wasn't really designed in the first place...because it didn't really need to be designed. There is a standard and it's minimal: - config files are text files - # indicates a comment Why standardize further when the types of programs that require config files run an extremely wide gamut? Types of programs can be as diverse as web servers, graphic editors, kernel modules, networking programs, etc. Each are vastly different. I don't need to wait for, worry about, or try to install an updated registry processor that knows about new object types. Better to build it into the program or rely on a library. Why change the entire system of configuration storage just for one new type of program? And text files are awesome for another reason: With the ability to comment config files you can understand any format - as well as include notes and conveniently have documentation where you need it. Also: You can't use git or other versioning to backup your registry keys and rollback to previous versions.
- trevorishere 5y ago
  For Windows, it's faster than accessing the file system (thanks to file system filter drivers).
michrassena 5y ago
I've never understood the criticism of the registry. The only times I've ever had an issue with it were when there were RAM or disk problems with the computer. On Windows there's nothing at all stopping developers of standard Windows applications from implementing their own config files and many do.
- beagle3 5y ago
  1. Most of the programs put things all over the place. If you install software and use it for a while, you may find lots of keys in lots of places, all subtly affecting something. It’s technically the fault of the program, not the registry. But culture and ecosystems matter, and by-and-large, Config in files is usually much more concentrated. 2. Related to (1), it is very hard to just move settings from one machine to another. How do you export your settings related to program X in order to use it on another machine? I keep my Linux config files in a git repository - I can easily track history and clone it to new machines. What’s the registry equivalent? 3. It is incredibly slow. When I still used windows, if I needed to do some registry editing, I would dump it to a text file, edit and then import the edited keys. That took about 1/10 of the time doing the same took in ResEdit.
  - Cosmin_C 5y ago
    I agree to the above in a painful way. I don't think of myself as a power user but I have at times to clean up the registry for stuff that uninstallers missed because the updated application does not want to install. It's a complete mess of having to dig through a tip to find a broken match box so you can destroy it without setting on fire the whole thing. Meanwhile OS X or Linux don't suffer from this and working with applications is a lot more "streamlined". As I said, this is just a slightly above average skilled end-user perspective.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      My experience with GNOME configuration repository, or files scattered around /etc, /opt/etc and /share kind of tells otherwise
  - 5y ago
nyanpasu64 5y ago
Editing the registry never results in corrupt unreadable intermediate states, unlike writing to config files. A workaround is "atomic save" (where one app writes to a different filename and renames it over the original). This ensures you'll never get torn reads (I think the Windows registry doesn't support transactional/atomic updates of multiple values at once), but you lose permissions and symlinks or something like that.
- zaat 5y ago
  Of course it did /does, and depending on how badly the registry corruption was, the whole system could be rendered unbootable.
  - techwizard81 5y ago
    It could and it did, but honestly, I personally have never seen any Win10 endpoint with any registry issues since it came out.
- VortexDream 5y ago
  Have you never experienced an unbootable system because of a corrupted registry? It's unfixable. And I'm not saying it happens when manually editing the registry. It might happen when Windows crashes at the wrong time and the system is in the middle of modifying it. It's quite failure-prone and I'm surprised it hasn't been improved much over the past decades.
  - nyanpasu64 5y ago
    Somehow I've never gotten a corrupted registry resulting in a broken account or system. Perhaps I'm lucky or too innocent in this regard. Though it does sound concerning if the Windows registry doesn't perform write-ahead logging like SQLite or a client-server database to enable crash recovery. I should research what key-value database libraries I can use as a cross-platform registry-like storage format that's more resilient to app or system crashes.
godtoldmetodoit 5y ago
You can use terminal tools on the registry fwiw. Powershell provides a native PSProvider that exposes the registry like a file system so you can cd into it and make changes.

by jeswin 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dboreham 5y ago

Registry never made much sense on the local system: just use the filesystem. I assume there was once a plan to use it in a networked fashion. But Active Directory replaced it for that purpose.

0xbadcafebee 5y ago
The filesystem isn't inherently bad, but the lack of a standard config format, location, and APIs is quite terrible. There's no reason a thousand programs should have a thousand different ways to be configured, it's just a legacy of poor design with no standardization.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  Actually there is a standard location for user settings: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-... Dconf complements it: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/dconf https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/dconf and dconf-editor is even similar to regedit. For system settings... that is a bit more complicated.
- tenebrisalietum 5y ago
  It's not poor design because it wasn't really designed in the first place...because it didn't really need to be designed. There is a standard and it's minimal: - config files are text files - # indicates a comment Why standardize further when the types of programs that require config files run an extremely wide gamut? Types of programs can be as diverse as web servers, graphic editors, kernel modules, networking programs, etc. Each are vastly different. I don't need to wait for, worry about, or try to install an updated registry processor that knows about new object types. Better to build it into the program or rely on a library. Why change the entire system of configuration storage just for one new type of program? And text files are awesome for another reason: With the ability to comment config files you can understand any format - as well as include notes and conveniently have documentation where you need it. Also: You can't use git or other versioning to backup your registry keys and rollback to previous versions.
trevorishere 5y ago
For Windows, it's faster than accessing the file system (thanks to file system filter drivers).

michrassena 5y ago

I've never understood the criticism of the registry. The only times I've ever had an issue with it were when there were RAM or disk problems with the computer. On Windows there's nothing at all stopping developers of standard Windows applications from implementing their own config files and many do.

beagle3 5y ago
1. Most of the programs put things all over the place. If you install software and use it for a while, you may find lots of keys in lots of places, all subtly affecting something. It’s technically the fault of the program, not the registry. But culture and ecosystems matter, and by-and-large, Config in files is usually much more concentrated. 2. Related to (1), it is very hard to just move settings from one machine to another. How do you export your settings related to program X in order to use it on another machine? I keep my Linux config files in a git repository - I can easily track history and clone it to new machines. What’s the registry equivalent? 3. It is incredibly slow. When I still used windows, if I needed to do some registry editing, I would dump it to a text file, edit and then import the edited keys. That took about 1/10 of the time doing the same took in ResEdit.
- Cosmin_C 5y ago
  I agree to the above in a painful way. I don't think of myself as a power user but I have at times to clean up the registry for stuff that uninstallers missed because the updated application does not want to install. It's a complete mess of having to dig through a tip to find a broken match box so you can destroy it without setting on fire the whole thing. Meanwhile OS X or Linux don't suffer from this and working with applications is a lot more "streamlined". As I said, this is just a slightly above average skilled end-user perspective.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    My experience with GNOME configuration repository, or files scattered around /etc, /opt/etc and /share kind of tells otherwise
- 5y ago

nyanpasu64 5y ago

Editing the registry never results in corrupt unreadable intermediate states, unlike writing to config files. A workaround is "atomic save" (where one app writes to a different filename and renames it over the original). This ensures you'll never get torn reads (I think the Windows registry doesn't support transactional/atomic updates of multiple values at once), but you lose permissions and symlinks or something like that.

zaat 5y ago
Of course it did /does, and depending on how badly the registry corruption was, the whole system could be rendered unbootable.
- techwizard81 5y ago
  It could and it did, but honestly, I personally have never seen any Win10 endpoint with any registry issues since it came out.
VortexDream 5y ago
Have you never experienced an unbootable system because of a corrupted registry? It's unfixable. And I'm not saying it happens when manually editing the registry. It might happen when Windows crashes at the wrong time and the system is in the middle of modifying it. It's quite failure-prone and I'm surprised it hasn't been improved much over the past decades.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  Somehow I've never gotten a corrupted registry resulting in a broken account or system. Perhaps I'm lucky or too innocent in this regard. Though it does sound concerning if the Windows registry doesn't perform write-ahead logging like SQLite or a client-server database to enable crash recovery. I should research what key-value database libraries I can use as a cross-platform registry-like storage format that's more resilient to app or system crashes.

godtoldmetodoit 5y ago

You can use terminal tools on the registry fwiw. Powershell provides a native PSProvider that exposes the registry like a file system so you can cd into it and make changes.