

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

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.<p>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.<p>So just for software development I have found that I have gone back to Windows.
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makecheck
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".

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cl8ton
If your serious I'll post my windows story...BUT this is the giveaway ;)

"Notepad++ on Windows"

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hoodoof
I don't get it. What's funny about Notepad++? It's a great programmers editor.

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cl8ton
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?

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ricardobeat
haha nice joke.

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hoodoof
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
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
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
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>

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.

