James, over at Programming in the 21st century has recently written about how the desktop is an acceptable place for the storage of documents and files. And I couldn't agree more, assuming we are not talking about code.
THE BIG BUCKET
Whilst my current (office) desktop is only partially covered by icons, its only because every time it gets full, I file the current contents into a sub folder and start again. This rarely happens however as I never minimize all windows or reboot enough to notice the full desktop ;0)
The fact is that I store all documents I'm working on straight to the desktop because the file save / open dialog is slow slow to do anything but click on the Desktop icon - by the time I've got to saving a document, I'm already onto the next thing and dealing with a sluggish file browser is enough of a delay that I'm reaching for the browser whilst it churns along. Moving to Windows 7 + an SSD did make a lot of difference, but nothing close to my tolerance still.
FILE RETRIEVAL
Whilst the desktop is a good for saving, in retrieving the files Servant Salamander is my go to choice for a file manager (in the Norton Command style).
Things I use this for all the time:
THE BIG BUCKET
Whilst my current (office) desktop is only partially covered by icons, its only because every time it gets full, I file the current contents into a sub folder and start again. This rarely happens however as I never minimize all windows or reboot enough to notice the full desktop ;0)
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| Icons blurred to protect the guilty! |
The fact is that I store all documents I'm working on straight to the desktop because the file save / open dialog is slow slow to do anything but click on the Desktop icon - by the time I've got to saving a document, I'm already onto the next thing and dealing with a sluggish file browser is enough of a delay that I'm reaching for the browser whilst it churns along. Moving to Windows 7 + an SSD did make a lot of difference, but nothing close to my tolerance still.
FILE RETRIEVAL
Whilst the desktop is a good for saving, in retrieving the files Servant Salamander is my go to choice for a file manager (in the Norton Command style).
Things I use this for all the time:
- Fast directory switching on my local disk and file opening / closing / deleting / moving etc...
- Navigating ANY network drive - for some reason, its x10 faster than Windows explorer and makes the
- [S] FTP / SCP copying to / from Linux boxes
- Creating a customized list of files from a directory
- Directory size calculation
- Viewing various types of compressed file (zip, tar, gz etc...)
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| Typical use - local disk left, remote disk right (this one via SSH) |
And yes, this version is unregistered still! After the last laptop upgrade, the license key bought in another country 5 years ago went missing. Not only does the unlicensed version crash repeatedly, but I am to cheap to simply buy it again and would rather spend endless hours scouring old emails for the key. I'll break soon and re-buy any day now...
SAME AND SIMPLE
I never used the Function key shortcuts however in these file managers, or added any customizations to it however - like my love affair with Nano, I get things done so much faster learning a tool that is 90% of my requirements over tweaking something for months then having to sync all the systems I use together with the same settings. Muscle memory is unforgiving when the latest tweak to you .rc file hasn't been replicated to that one box - its like a mental stubbing of the toe.
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