Xah Lee, 2009-06
This pages gives some tips on Windows Vista customization for power users.
You can set you system to require pressing “Ctrl+Alt+Delete” to start the login screen. The advantage is that this prevent the possibility of some rogue program spoofing as the login screen and steal your password. For some detail, see: Secure attention key.
To set it up, press “Win+r”, then type “netplwiz” in command prompt to start the Advanced User Accounts control panel. Then, check the box “Require users to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete”.
Under “Regional and Language Options”, under “Keyboards and Languages” tab, add Dvorak keyboard, as well as Chinese input system.
Under Control Panel, Keyboard, Speed tab. Set “Repeat delay” to shortest, and set “Repeat rate” to Fastest.
Some people likes to switch Control and Cap Lock. I think that's idiotic. See: Why You Should Not Swap Caps Lock With Control.
Besides mouse speed, you can set it so that hovering over a window makes that window active. This is done in “Control Panel, Ease of Access Center, Make the mouse easier to use”.
I like this feature because it saves me a click. However, it takes some adjust in operation habit because sometimes if you carelessly moved your mouse, some background window pops to the front. This is especially annoying when the window you are working on is small such as dialogs. You have then to fish out which window you was on. I still like this feature. You just have to be careful to not move your mouse unintentionally.
In the unix world, a programer celebrity Steve Yegge wrote a rant about it, here: Source. He tells us that there are 2 flavors to this feature, one is autofocus and the other is autoraise. Autoraise is to have mouse pointer automatically raise the window under point to foreground, as implemented in Windows Vista. Autofocus is the ability to make the window under pointer to capture typing and shortcuts (but do stays in background), so that, you can type something to a background window without actually raising it to foreground. The scenario is that sometimes you just want to type something in some window (such as in a text terminal), and the trip to raise that window, type, then switch back to your original window, is 2 aim-and-click too-much.
In his opinion, autofocus is fantastic while autoraise is a pain in the ass. In my opinion, i can't possibly imagine giving a flying fuck about autofocus feature. It wreak havoc on consistency and intuitiveness of user interface. If you cave in to such hacks in user interface, pretty soon your user interface is one inconsistent salad bowl, where you have to remember by rote each application's behavior or operation in order to squeeze out some convenience, and on the whole, you became less efficient. (this situation happens in the unix X Windows, where even copy & paste isn't consistent across apps (nor do they actually work), and each app or windows manager insist their way as better. Linux's KDE & Gnome (both started in late 1990s) fixed this part of consistency by copying Windows almost whole sale.)
First thing to customize is the Folder Options. This is under Control Panel, Folder Options. In particular, uncheck the “Hide extensions for known file types”, “Display the full path in the title bar”, “Show hidden files and folders”.
The Flip 3D is great, but also idiotic. When active, only one window is completely visible, thus user has to click several times to see others.
If you have a Microsoft Mouse with the bundled IntelliPoint driver installed, it has a similar feature called Instant Viewer, where all windows are shown as large thumbnails, arranged in a grid on your screen. This feature is available since 2002. I much prefer this implementation, however, the uniform matrix arrangement makes it considerably difficult to discern which window is which. If i have 10 or more windows, it takes a second or 2 to recognize which window i want. This still beats clicking thru each window in Flip 3D.
The best implementation of this idea is Mac OS X's Exposé, where all windows are shown in large thumbnail, retaining the relative sizes and shape, arranged on your screen in some natural way that is not a artificial and uniform grid. And, there's a 0.5 second animation, where your windows shrink and moves smoothly from their original positions to their Exposé representation, giving user a clear sense of which window came from where.
There are several freeware to mimic Exposé feature on Windows, the best one i found is one called Switcher by Bao Nguyen at http://insentient.net/. Vista only. For others, see: Exposé clone.
