[busterarm]

My last Windows OS will be Windows 7 because of many similar problems and reasoning.

This has spawned a change in career because I currently make my living working in the Windows space. I'm throwing away 15 years of experience and a deep knowledge of Windows' internals. Also, work has slowed down tremendously since the year or so leading up to through the release of Windows 8. I don't see my current job existing in two years or other people as capable remaining where they are.

I can only address one of your gripes, but not really. Powershell isn't that bad. It's not good, but it's not that bad. It can do some things, but probably not the ones you really want.

[jjoonathan]

Yeah, I need to check out powershell. I've heard that it has some pretty neat tricks up its sleeve regarding typed output. I won't expect more than "two steps back, one step forward" wrt the UNIX command line, but I should check it out.

Anything on my new "gripes" list that you have advice for?

---------- More Misc Gripes --------

* No emacs-like cursor movement shortcuts in GUI text fields

* No emacs-like cursor movement shortcuts in DOS

* Copy+paste is broken and/or inconsistent in terminal windows

* Can't jump to a document's location from the document's GUI

* The 2nd type of file open/save dialog (you know, the one makes you start from root, makes you scroll through every folder, and doesn't support copy+paste of paths, favorites, or any other civilized feature?)

* No equivalent of "Spin Control.app" (now spindump, Instruments.app) that automatically traces hung apps

* Can't take time profiles (function call trees weighted by # hits over a 5s interval) from the built-in process viewer

* NTFS wants to spend 8 hours (I let it go and timed it once) checking the disk after every crash, which amounts to every other time I restart.

* No "screenshot region to clipboard" shortcut. I have to printscreen and crop in paint every time.

* No "look up the word under the mouse in a dictionary" shortcut

---------- More Misc Small Victories --------

* The utility that profiles startup times and identifies boot-slowing apps is awesome

[bane]

* No emacs-like cursor movement shortcuts in GUI text fields

* No emacs-like cursor movement shortcuts in DOS

You will definitely not find emacs-like anything in Windows-land. It's pretty much an anathema in the ecosystem.

* Copy+paste is broken and/or inconsistent in terminal windows

Copy+paste in cmd.exe works weird (not to mention that cmd.exe is far inferior to even basic terminals in the x-nix world).

1) Click the upper left icon/button in cmd

2) Click edit/Mark

3) With you mouse select what you want to copy

4) Hit enter

5) It's now in your clipboard and can be ctrl-V'd anywhere else This works 100% of the time and is consistent even if it's weird. I suspect they couldn't get ctrl+<key> deconflicted for dos compatibility and it just sort of stuck around

to paste into cmd:

1) Have something in your clipboard

2) click the upper left icon/button in cmd

3) Click edit/paste

4) Stuff pastes. This also works 100% of the time as expected.

* Can't jump to a document's location from the document's GUI

What do you mean? Pg-up/down doesn't work? Or you need to ctrl+f find?

* The 2nd type of file open/save dialog (you know, the one makes you start from root, makes you scroll through every folder, and doesn't support copy+paste of paths, favorites, or any other civilized feature?)

No idea, some oddball java/cross platform gui toolkits screw up the conventions but I just checked all the apps I typically use and I can click in the path at the top of the dialog and type/paste/etc. my path.

* No equivalent of "Spin Control.app" (now spindump, Instruments.app) that automatically traces hung apps

True, you probably need a third party util. They're likely dozens and they'll likely all be free.

* Can't take time profiles (function call trees weighted by # hits over a 5s interval) from the built-in process viewer

True, the process lister is no ps.

* NTFS wants to spend 8 hours (I let it go and timed it once) checking the disk after every crash, which amounts to every other time I restart.

One of my pet peeves is that Microsoft really needs to get a modern file system. NTFS is "ok" for all the permissions stuff, but it's a lousy file system w/r to putting files in sane places on the disk. Defragging should be a rare thing and checking for disk errors should be much faster.

That being said, why is your machine crashing that much? My uptime in Windows is usually measured in months and outside of bad hardware they don't crash -- ever. My last Windows desktop ran without a crash for 3 years then 3 more years (it crashed because of PSU issues, pop in a new PSU and it was up and running fine). My brand new machine is a month old and I haven't had it crash yet and it's been up and running continuously.

My Mac crashes or beachballs every couple of weeks in comparison. Either that or the system will just start behaving weird and I'll have to restart.

* No "screenshot region to clipboard" shortcut. I have to printscreen and crop in paint every time.

1) Use the snipping tool.

2) Be glad you have paint. I've needed to do some cropping on my mac and the lack of a basic paint program is forehead slapping.

* No "look up the word under the mouse in a dictionary" shortcut

This is very app dependent some like Office have better support for this sort of thing. But I agree, it would be nice. I usually just define:<word> in chrome and use google for it.

[maxerickson]

Turning on "Quick Edit Mode" and "Insert Mode" help make cmd a little better:

http://stackoverflow.com/a/131977

[busterarm]

For the NTFS thing, prior to Windows 8, I would have said remove autochk in the registry. Microsoft overhauled how it checks disks in Windows 8, supposedly to save time, but I don't know if that works anymore.