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de-defaulting Windows 7
Sunday, June 3 2012
Throughout the day today I researched and implemented various strategies to make Windows 7 less horrible than its defaults insist that it must be. The hardest of these defaults to crack is a single item that, all by itself, has made me never want to implement another installation of Windows: the unncessarily-large line spacing in Windows Explorer windows. When I bring up a list of files in a directory, I want to see as many as possible at one time within the restraints of legibility concerns. In this regard, Windows XP does a good job. But Windows 7 is an abomination; for some reason it insists on inserting a fairly large number of blank pixels between every item in an Explorer list. This was probably a design decision; letting "elements breathe" is an oft-mentioned concern of designers who, left to their own devices, will design a full page ad for the New York Times with a single brief corporate slogan in 12 point font beneath a picture of a white man in business attire sipping coffee. But in the confined world of a computer screen, real estate is valuable and shouldn't be so easily wasted. There's a very real difference between the productivity of a person looking at a straightforward list and a person looking at a designer's idea of what an ideal list should look like, and that difference favors the person using the most-compact list possible. Using Google, I found several different threads where people tried to crack the line spacing issue, but the easiest solution turned out to be a side-effect of another Windows 7 fix: Disable Auto-Arrange Folders in Windows 7. Once I ran that registry modification, my Explorer windows were almost as compact as Windows XP Explorer windows can be. I still had to use the Organize menu to turn off the unnecessarily-large-and-useless Details and Navigation panes, and at some point I will also wan to get rid of the otherwise-useless Organize toolbar itself. Microsoft seems to have forgotten an important user-interface axiom: the key to productivity on a computer is not having valuable screen real estate filled with unnecessary whitespace, toolbars, and status displays, especially at the expense of perhaps the most useful user-interface element: the menubar. I mean, come on Microsoft, are you fucking retarded? Because you seem retarded! (And I mean that in the diagnostic, non-pejorative sense.)
Another problem with the Windows 7 interface stems from its insistence on launching a live search of unknown parts of the directory structure the moment one starts typing on the keyboard while in an Explorer window. In the past, what would happen when one started typing in an Explorer window is that the window would scroll to whatever item's first few characters matched what had been typed. I hadn't realized how much I used this functionality until Windows 7 tried to impose a different functionality. Happily, there is a way to restore the old Windows XP behavior, though it cannot be done (as one would expect) from the search tab of Folder Options. Instead it is the last item of the View tab of Folder Options, the one worded "When typing into a list view."
Later in the day I even got my Canon LiDE scanner working. I had to install a third-party application called VueScan, which has support for scanners that otherwise will not work in a 64 bit environment.
At some point I drove out to 9W and bought five sheets of 3/8 inch plywood to use as outdoor wall material on the new greenhouse upstairs. I also resupplied my laboratory's decidedly bottom-shelf liquor cabinet. Unfortunately for some reason Home Depot doesn't stock any self-drilling screws suitable for exposure to the outdoor elements, but I found something that might just work anyway.
Meanwhile Gretchen had driven out to the Woodbourne Prison in Sullivan County to attend another graduation for the program from which she had recently been fired (that's dedication!). On the way back, she met up with her friend Sarah the Korean (who isn't Korean) and the two went to New Paltz to attend an art opening by KMOCA's Michæl that I had decided to skip out on. I also skipped out on dinner at Momiji, the Japanese restaurant in Stone Ridge, featuring most of the sort of friends who we eat out with. I'd just had a similar experience last night and needed a night off from socializing.
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