3 ms·

Time heals all wounds? I seem to be returning to Windows (just a little bit).

9 points by hoodoof 15y ago

I made the move to OSX a few years back and never looked back. I was sick of Windows crashing, its spaghetti registry, its many many many ways of doing the same thing - all implemented differently by whichever third party hardware vendor wrote the drivers. So I was happy to wave bye bye to Windows. But recently I have found that I prefer doing development on Windows - somehow it feels more "precise", in an intangible sort of way. Certainly Windows feels faster. Much as I love my Mac, it has always felt sluggish and never felt super snappy like Windows. So just for software development I have found that I have gone back to Windows.

ricardobeat 15y ago
haha nice joke.
- hoodoof 15y ago
  No joke. Maybe it's the Mac keyboard too which I'm not as fast on as a generic PC keyboard. Also the availability of Notepad++ on Windows.
  - makecheck 15y ago
    No such thing as a Mac keyboard really...you can replace it with any USB keyboard you want. Then again I like the default one, it's very silent and the flat keys are kind of unique. Only stupid thing is that some important keys are too small, like function keys and sometimes the arrows.
    - aquark 15y ago
      As a many year Windows programmer I _love_ typing on my 2011 MacBook Pro keyboard except for the cursor movement. I can't seem to train my fingers to handle the different combinations of Alt/Opt/Cmd/Ctrl/Shift and the arrow keys. The lack of discrete page up/down and home/end keys really affects productivity.
      - makecheck 15y ago
        You can use Control-down-arrow and Control-up-arrow to move by pages, and Command-up-arrow and Command-down-arrow like Home/End. But note it is technically possible to remap key bindings for text fields in any way you want. Here is one article about it: http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html Basically, Cocoa methods exist for almost any imaginable text editing action (such as pageDown), and they can be mapped to any keys. I would also imagine there's a way to map them to gestures on the MacBook's trackpad.
      - masterj 15y ago
        ctrl+a = Home, ctrl+e = End These work in all Cocoa apps. I use them constantly. Having caps lock remapped to ctrl helps.
cl8ton 15y ago
If your serious I'll post my windows story...BUT this is the giveaway ;) "Notepad++ on Windows"
- hoodoof 15y ago
  I don't get it. What's funny about Notepad++? It's a great programmers editor.
  - cl8ton 15y ago
    My point exactly! Who could resist an editor with the symbols ++ after the name, my god that's brilliant marketing!
  - cl8ton 15y ago
    Nice the ref to "Notepad++ on Windows" is gone. You know S Balmer throws a chair against the wall and breaks into the "Monkey Boy dance" every time he reads a post like this?
makecheck 15y ago
I've actually had the opposite impression; I couldn't believe how little Windows actually came with for development. While I'm not a fan of everything that comes with the Mac, I've never felt that it had any gaping holes like Windows does (e.g. Windows doesn't come with SSH or Perl or Python or even a reasonable shell and terminal, much less other useful utilities). In fact, sometimes the Mac has almost too many options; the Mac ships with something like 5 text editors, and that's before realizing there are excellent 3rd party ones too. It's clear that Windows can be made tolerable with some effort, but I've sort of lost patience with having to do what a company with Microsoft's money should be able to provide by itself. My last exposure to Visual Studio was version 2005, and it started with the realization that the program was basically incapable of saving to the previous version of its own file format (which completely threw off my version control on a project where all other team members were stuck with older IDEs). I also remember with disdain opening Visual Studio 2005 and being given about 15 characters of space in which to type a series of "#include" search paths; I kid you not, it was faster to mount a network drive, open Linux and "vim", and edit the project XML file directly, than it was to futz with Microsoft's poorly-thought-out GUI to perform the same tasks. I'm willing to allow that I've just had some bad experiences, and I hear so much praise for Microsoft's environments that I constantly feel like I must just be missing something. Yet everything I've seen doesn't make me think "snappy", it makes me think "kludgey, buggy, poorly-conceived mess from company with enough money to do much, much better".

9 points by hoodoof 15y ago

ricardobeat 15y ago

haha nice joke.

hoodoof 15y ago
No joke. Maybe it's the Mac keyboard too which I'm not as fast on as a generic PC keyboard. Also the availability of Notepad++ on Windows.
- makecheck 15y ago
  No such thing as a Mac keyboard really...you can replace it with any USB keyboard you want. Then again I like the default one, it's very silent and the flat keys are kind of unique. Only stupid thing is that some important keys are too small, like function keys and sometimes the arrows.
  - aquark 15y ago
    As a many year Windows programmer I _love_ typing on my 2011 MacBook Pro keyboard except for the cursor movement. I can't seem to train my fingers to handle the different combinations of Alt/Opt/Cmd/Ctrl/Shift and the arrow keys. The lack of discrete page up/down and home/end keys really affects productivity.
    - makecheck 15y ago
      You can use Control-down-arrow and Control-up-arrow to move by pages, and Command-up-arrow and Command-down-arrow like Home/End. But note it is technically possible to remap key bindings for text fields in any way you want. Here is one article about it: http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html Basically, Cocoa methods exist for almost any imaginable text editing action (such as pageDown), and they can be mapped to any keys. I would also imagine there's a way to map them to gestures on the MacBook's trackpad.
    - masterj 15y ago
      ctrl+a = Home, ctrl+e = End These work in all Cocoa apps. I use them constantly. Having caps lock remapped to ctrl helps.

cl8ton 15y ago

If your serious I'll post my windows story...BUT this is the giveaway ;) "Notepad++ on Windows"

hoodoof 15y ago
I don't get it. What's funny about Notepad++? It's a great programmers editor.
- cl8ton 15y ago
  My point exactly! Who could resist an editor with the symbols ++ after the name, my god that's brilliant marketing!
- cl8ton 15y ago
  Nice the ref to "Notepad++ on Windows" is gone. You know S Balmer throws a chair against the wall and breaks into the "Monkey Boy dance" every time he reads a post like this?

makecheck 15y ago

I've actually had the opposite impression; I couldn't believe how little Windows actually came with for development. While I'm not a fan of everything that comes with the Mac, I've never felt that it had any gaping holes like Windows does (e.g. Windows doesn't come with SSH or Perl or Python or even a reasonable shell and terminal, much less other useful utilities). In fact, sometimes the Mac has almost too many options; the Mac ships with something like 5 text editors, and that's before realizing there are excellent 3rd party ones too. It's clear that Windows can be made tolerable with some effort, but I've sort of lost patience with having to do what a company with Microsoft's money should be able to provide by itself. My last exposure to Visual Studio was version 2005, and it started with the realization that the program was basically incapable of saving to the previous version of its own file format (which completely threw off my version control on a project where all other team members were stuck with older IDEs). I also remember with disdain opening Visual Studio 2005 and being given about 15 characters of space in which to type a series of "#include" search paths; I kid you not, it was faster to mount a network drive, open Linux and "vim", and edit the project XML file directly, than it was to futz with Microsoft's poorly-thought-out GUI to perform the same tasks. I'm willing to allow that I've just had some bad experiences, and I hear so much praise for Microsoft's environments that I constantly feel like I must just be missing something. Yet everything I've seen doesn't make me think "snappy", it makes me think "kludgey, buggy, poorly-conceived mess from company with enough money to do much, much better".