I’m a Windows user for many reasons, not the least of which are access to compilers and gaming applications. However, one of the very first things I do on any system I touch is change shells.
To me, Explorer, with its default settings, is a piece of junk. It annoys me as a developer every time I have to deal with them. Also, since I switch PCs and deal with new PCs on a fairly regular basis, I find changing all the Explorer settings to be a royal pain.
Also, though in most situations I work with dual monitors, as a web developer I often have upwards of thirty windows open, what with as many as six different web browsers, Visual Studio 2005, text editors such as Notepad++ and EditPlus 2 for PHP editing, file browsing windows open in several locations, etc.
To deal with this, I use a shell called bbLean. Most people that see it accuse me of running a Mac or Linux, but it’s actually a Windows shell. I’d be very interested in seeing a review of this software by Jeff.
bbLean radically changes the way you work with your computer. Sure, you still have a taskbar–though now you can position it anywhere on the screen with a bit of text file editing–but instead of a start menu, all this taskbar provides is a system tray and window list. You can toggle the window list between displaying window title + icon, window title, or just the icon–WONDERFUL if you have 30 windows open, most of which have their own unique icons.
Also, instead of the standard start menu and/or file browsers, bbLean provides a menu that can be accessed from anywhere simply by right-clicking on the desktop or tapping the windows key. This menu provides a start-menu type interface that actually spans your entire computer–you can literally use it to browse down into the deepest level of your windows folders. In addition, it’s far faster to use than opening an Explorer window and browsing to your destination, as folders open as fast as you can mouse over their names in the menu. Of course, if you click outside the menu it disappears–however, you can click on the header of any folder or subfolder menu, drag it to where you want, and it “pins” the menu in place there until you right-click on the header again to close it or drag it somewhere else again. It also supports drag-and-drop copying between menus, Explorer windows (at any time you can open an Explorer window simply by double-clicking a folder), and many other programs.
It takes a bit of getting used to, and you do have to be fairly accurate with the mouse (or just use the keyboard to navigate the menus, which is also quite simple), but the results are astonishing. I can drill into a program in the Program Files folder and drag it onto a contact in my instant messaging application to send it to that user within 5 seconds, as opposed to it requiring perhaps 30 seconds to wait for an explorer window to load, then navigate through each folder.
It also has some other very beneficial effects as well–it doesn’t load desktop icons (though by default in its menu it has a root-level folder that points to your desktop), and generally uses less than 10 MB of RAM–try getting Explorer to do that if you have more than 10 desktop icons. You can do pretty much anything you want to with it, since its configuration files and plugin locations are all defined in text files. You can change skins and themes in less than 2 seconds, and design complex themes in mere minutes with their theme designer.
It really is a tremendous leap forward in usability in my opinion, and I would be very interested in hearing a review from Jeff about it.
By default it’s designed for Windows XP, but it can be adapted to Vista (the only thing that needs changed are the file paths for things such as the My Documents folder, which don’t exist on Vista)–and again, all of that information is stored in simple text files.
The website of bbLean is http://bb4win.sourceforge.net/bblean/ . I’d highly encourage those who use windows but don’t like the windows interface to give it a one-week trial. I did, and never looked back.