Organization, by Vista
February 28th, 2007I love the responses I get when I tell people I’m using Vista. “You must be feeling brave.” “Why did you do that?” “Vista? Isn’t that a rip off of OS X?” I didn’t get a single, “Sweet, how is it?”, so I’ll use this forum to tell you how it is.
Vista fixes a lot of little things that irked me about XP. The improvement I like most is the new home folder for organizing files like documents, pictures, downloads, etc. Windows XP had My Documents and in it some other folders like My Pictures, My Music, and My Videos. This setup has three issues. First, the “My” prefix was not only dorky but it added unnecessary length to the name and confused app’s that don’t know how to handle spaces in a folder name. You’d think that since spaces have been allowed in directory names since Windows 95 that programs would be able to handle them, but I still see scripts and installers that mess this up. I happen to like cygwin, a *nix-style environment and shell for Windows, and bash doesn’t play nice with spaces. Suffice it to say it’s just less of a hassle to work with C:\Users\Josh\Documents than “C:\Documents and Settings\Josh\My Documents”.
My second issue with XP’s document organization scheme is that the hierarchy is broken. XP stuffed everything under the sun into My Documents. Pictures, music, and movies are not documents, I’m sorry. You could argue that in some abstract, theoretical way… but you’d be wrong. Pictures, music, and movies do not belong in My Documents. Vista gets this right. Inside my home folder (e.g. C:\Users\Josh) there’s a folder for Documents, there’s a folder for Pictures, one for Music, Favories, Downloads, Contacts, Videos, Links, Searches, Saved Games, and the Desktop. All my stuff, nicely organized, finally!
So it turns out that I don’t like having all my data in C:\Users\Josh. I have two hard drives, one for Windows, all my applications, game installs, etc. and the other for my data. I call it my H: drive, which is a hold over from my years at the Academy of the New Church where the network was set up such that H: was always your home drive. The main reason I like this setup is that I can back up my data and my operating separately. I erase my install of Windows should I ever need to, and reinstall without touching my data. This drive setup never really worked with XP. I could move the My Documents folder (there’s an interface for doing that in the properties dialog for that folder) and most applications would still find the right documents. But when I moved the subfolders like My Pictures to a new home even the Start Menu got confused. I did everything possible, including hacking the registry to no avail. XP should hang a sign: “Don’t mess with my hierarchy”.
To my delight and surprise, Vista was happy when I moved my data to the H: drive. All the aforementioned folders (Documents, Music) in the home folder are treated specially in Vista. They have special icons and if you open up the Properties dialog on one of these guys you’ll see a Location tab and a Move button that makes it easy to migrate your folders. At first I was worried that the home folder concept would be broken when I emptied C:\Users\Josh of its contents. The top right item in the new Vista Start Menu is a shortcut to my home folder. Would this become useless? Vista came to the rescue with a little megabyte magic. Even after you relocate your folders to the drive and folder of your choosing, these special folders still show up in the home folder. It’s as if the folders are stored in two places at the same time! In *nix land this would be called a symbolic link, and this functionality meets Windows for the first time with Vista. Symbolic links are like shortcuts, with one key difference: the file system accepts symbolic links as valid paths. If the Documents folder remaining in the home folder was a real symbolic link to the new location (for some reason Microsoft chose to make them some other type of link) I would be able to type dir C:\Users\Josh\Documents and I would see the files listed in H:\Documents.
That’s probably enough talk about personal folders in Vista. Did you get that I like the new system? It’s a good step forward, a little step, but one that will hopefully help millions get more organized.
March 8th, 2007 at 3:46 pm
You almost have me convinced to go in search of new vistas, Josh. Better organization should eliminate wasted effort and make computer use less confusing and more enjoyable for us digital immigrants. Big question still to answer is cost/benefit one. Now tell me, when will they wake up to renaming the start icon?
–your friend in PA