What is Shadenvista?

You heard it here first: “Shadenvista”.

…pleasure taken from watching the misfortunes of Vista users.

Here are some random observations after more than 6 months hands-on usage with Vista.

Notepad

Notepad is unchanged in Vista. Unbelievable. All we really need is an editor that can open any type of text file correctly. But open up a file containing “LF” instead of “CRLF” endings, and you get rubbish:

VIM shows how this file should look:

I don’t get it.

Editing System Variables

All we really need is the ability to resize this dialog:

You cannot resize it. Another Vista failure.

Paint

What decade is this? Why hasn’t Paint changed?

Searching File Contents

I stumbled upon this while editing my WordPress custom theme. I needed to search for PHP files containing a certain snippet of text. For example, let’s search for files containing “true”:

First, the search screen is incredibly complex. But even worse, the results are WRONG. While the results show numerous .js files, all .php files are ignored.

Just like the failed Windows XP search, Vista only searches through a pre-configured list of file extensions. Since PHP is not on the list, you cannot search these files.

There is a workaround described here. Shouldn’t a modern operating system just let you “search” for text without worrying about these technical details?

Shadenvista

All you Mac users are laughing your asses off now, taking great pleasure in my misfortune. I’ve created a new T-Shirt just for you:

Go on over to the It’s Just a Bunch of Stuff store and check it out.