Arkhive (they/she)

It really just comes down to what you know. Moving from MacOS (from OS9 through like 10.12 or something) to Windows made me feel like Windows was the bent spoon. So many small things that to this day infuriate me. Just a couple that really stuck with me even after ditching both for Linux.

• if you have highlighted text to select it, and hit the right arrow, where should your cursor end up? MacOS decided the cursor will be after the last character within the highlight. Windows places the cursor after the first character outside of the highlight. Why does this matter? The reason I noticed it was trying to edit file names quickly. I would like to right click, select rename from the context menu, which selects the text in the editing field, tap the right arrow once to move my cursor to the end of the string, and begin deleting whatever amount of text I need. If I try to do this on windows I end up deleting part of the file extension unless I tap an additional time. Not a huge deal but it legitimately messed with my muscle memory in just basic typing on windows.
• the other aspect of MacOS that really is far and above anything windows has is ‘Preview’. Not QuickLook, which is a detail view of a file triggered by tapping space with it selected. I mean ‘Preview’ the graphics viewer utility. It’s one of those pieces of software that “just works”. It can import from pretty much any scanner, print to any printer, do basic image editing, open and edit PDFs. It’s really a phenomenal piece of software that feels like such a basic set of features that should exist in a default install of a flagship OS. Even the best free option of anything similar on windows doesn’t hold a candle to it.

These are two VERY cherry picked examples, but I also feel they exemplify the “what you already know is more comfortable” dichotomy. Like having to find a functional PDF tool is kind of just “normal” for windows. Few windows only users I know actively miss the inclusion of that by default, and a whole industry has formed around the need for PDF editing, and yet humble Preview still puts Adobe Acrobat to absolute shame.

Grew up in a cold part of the world, was a skier doing grinds and flips, but yeah, same idea!

Yeah when I went down a terminal config rabbit hole I landed on JetBrains Mono with all the nerd font symbols. Can’t really provide a particular reason I like it over many other fonts, but I just do.