Yours Patrick T

In Mac you edit your .bash_profile file (Linux is more or less the same). In other words, there is no UI to do it. The thinking being if you need to set an environment variable, you should probably know how to use a text editor and the shell. Leading to my sub point of, maybe removing some of these items from the UI and giving a proper shell might make things a bit nicer… anyway…

@Justin Carter – yeah some apps (like adium) include growl. I don’t use growl day to day, but I do find it nicer than the balloons. I can’t explain why though – it just seems less intrusive for some reason.

I’ve played with the power shell, and I like the idea. If they make a combination of a proper shell and power shell that might have better luck. The power shell is basically just a made up thing that doesn’t have millions of tutorials and history on line. For example:

find ./ -name “.svn” -exec rm -rf {} \;

I use things like that all day long, and the power shell may or may not help with that. If it handled that plus other stuff I might learn the power shell, but as it stands it’s a useless app to me (and anyone else how knows the basics of Unix / Linux)

@John Gag totally, check it out. It’s worth a look.

@Jason Langdon I figured Vista might, but I haven’t run it at all. I also like how search searches the folder you are looking at. In mac the finder search searches the whole computer instead of the current folder (which seems kind of silly to me)

Vista already has the search functionality that you describe in Windows 7. Hit the Windows button and start typing, it’s one of the saving graces of the OS.

On OS X you have some apps trying to display their own notifications (ugly) and developers trying to use Growl for somewhat standardised notifications, though Growl is still fairly ugly itself and needs to be downloaded and installed separately (unless some apps bundle it now?). And sometimes the dock icons just bounce up and down and keep bouncing until you click on them, yayy :P

I had to laugh at your environment variable example though, it’s pretty funny to see the steps written out like that. It’s literally stuff that hasn’t been reworked since Windows 95 – if they move it, people will complain, but if they don’t move it then it get’s more buried because “My Computer” isn’t staring you in the face on your desktop any more (unless you put it back there). You could use the Win + Break key combo to skip the first 5 clicks you made but it still involves a lot of clicking.

Coincidentally, PowerShell is great for setting environment variables at the local/user/machine level: I haven’t used PowerShell much at all, but I think it’s just as useful as bash or csh, it’s just different and takes time to learn.

And the sideways folders… Well they’re just plain logical and awesome, you can’t diss them! Ok, yes you can, they’re ridiculous :P

1. Start, right click Computer, properties, Advanced System Settings, Environment variables.

2. start, cmd, enter, setenv PATH=”%PATH%;C:\SomeNewBinDir”

I’m sure most of the tasks you mean have their simpler versions. As I don’t know Mac you don’t know Win. That’s fair.