Windows Irritations, Visual Studio
- Font sizes
- Crappy Bluetooth Support
- Visual Studio
One way that the Windows graphical desktop is more primitive than the Linux graphical desktop is that the GNOME font size can be adjusted system-wide. That is, I can change the font settings for GNOME, and all applications respect that.
For example, my mother wishes to have large text on the desktop for easy reading, but would also like to have high resolution for viewing pictures. If you crank the resolution up to the max on a decent monitor, it can be hard to read without a magnifying glass.
For myself, I'd like to listen to stereo music without any wires, and be able to use my phone as well. The default Windows Bluetooth stack does not support stereo music (A2DP) over Bluetooth. Because I don't own either of the laptops I use for work, I can't replace the default stack with another stack that does support A2DP.
Linux does support A2DP of course.
This next part should probably be an entirely different post...
Visual Studio is really quite primitive compared to emacs, except in three respects.
emacs does not have support for a collection of files as a 'Project'.
emacs does not have a framework for auto-completion of members (Intellisense).
emacs does not do incremental compilation and report the resulting errors via syntax highlighting.
Visual Studio does not support multiple monitors.
Visual Studio is not scriptable that I can find.
Visual Studio does not have a way to take notes or edit text.
The list of non-programming things that emacs can do that Visual Studio cannot do is long.
IRC, email, eshell, generic subprocess support, calculator, calendar, apply shell commands to regions, edit files via ssh/scp/telnet ... these are the first things that come to mind.
The biggest lack I've felt is that I cannot script visual studio.
For example, my coworkers and I both work on my laptop(s), sort of like pair programming.
I use my kinesis keyboard to do hardware remapping to dvorak, and my coworkers use the laptop itself to type qwerty. But I'd also like to switch to emacs keybindings, and still be able to easily switch back to standard keybindings so my coworkers can have a familiar environment.
I have not yet come up with a cost analysis comparing the amount of time I've spent customizing emacs with the amount of money it would cost to own the best version of visual studio since 1999 when I last purchased it in Seattle. One point that springs to (probably biased) mind is that my emacs customizations have only required minimal updating, thus keeping my emacs knowledge investment.
Visual Studio has many worthwhile extensions, most of which cost money (VisualSVN is $50).
If emacs were to get support for project management and intellisense, I would encourage visual studio users to switch.