Maybe it's dumb to call these tricks, but they are things I didn't know about until recently that I wish I had known earlier. Maybe someone else would find it useful. Or maybe I'm the only one who still uses the command prompt all the time?
On a folder, if you hold shift and right click, it gives you an "open in command prompt" option. Yay, no more typing in cd "stupidly long directory name v1.4.56"!
In the command prompt, typing the name of a file alone will open it with it's associated program. I discovered this by accident, and was shocked and amazed. Just typing "smb.nes" in the command prompt for example does the same thing as double-clicking it in the file explorer.
Maybe these 2 features had been around forever and I was just ignorant? I don't know. Obviously I'm one who's old computing habits die hard. Hell, I was using DOS well into the year 2000, using Arachne for internet (or as my friend called it, the "Fred Flintstone web browser"), only launching Win3.11 only when I needed to. Skipped '95, and was a late adopter of 98. Looking at my Win7 install date, it looks I ditched XP only in 2013 (edit: had 2003 as a typo). Which is pretty fast for my usual standards, I suppose. And it was only this year that I finally bought myself a laptop (costing a whole $200, pretty amazing what you get for that, though!)
Oh, and the cmd.exe oddity I was going to mention, kind of random but.. I had made a few desktop shortcuts to cmd.exe that start in various directories for my different projects. What seems really strange to me is that in one of them, if I open it and type "cd.." I get the "'cd..' is not a recognized command etc." error message. Typing "cd .." (with space) works fine. "cd.." works fine everywhere else I've used it. Must be the folder name or something? It's only in "c:\proj\pic32\squeedo\" where that happens. It's not really what I'd consider a problem, I just don't get the logic behind that at all.
I've been pretty happy with Win 7 overall, really the only thing that pisses me off is that they took out the MIDI device options from the control panel. I used to think it was funny as hell that I could run my Squeedo synth mapped to a MIDI device, then in Windows XP I could select it as the system's MIDI-out device, so every old Windows game that uses MIDI would sound like my own custom chiptune thing. There was something strangely satisfying about playing canyon.mid in media player through that, heheh. But Microsoft had to go and take away my MIDI fun. Oh well, I guess if I went back I'd probably find lots of the stuff I haven't tried in while were probably 16-bit programs that wouldn't even work anymore, since I've gone to 64-bit. Of course any "serious" program that uses MIDI will let you select the device yourself, rather than only use the system default. I'm kind of afraid to see what else I'll lose if/when I go to Win10. My laptop is on 10, but I don't do much on it yet other than editing text.
Anyone else have any random windows 7 tips, it'd be interesting to hear. Doesn't have to be related to command-line stuff, that's kind of a small arena as it is. Any reason to not go to Windows 10? Yeah I know about the telemetry stuff everyone is up in arms about, that's documented everywhere already. But any other reason from anyone's experience?
On a folder, if you hold shift and right click, it gives you an "open in command prompt" option. Yay, no more typing in cd "stupidly long directory name v1.4.56"!
In the command prompt, typing the name of a file alone will open it with it's associated program. I discovered this by accident, and was shocked and amazed. Just typing "smb.nes" in the command prompt for example does the same thing as double-clicking it in the file explorer.
Maybe these 2 features had been around forever and I was just ignorant? I don't know. Obviously I'm one who's old computing habits die hard. Hell, I was using DOS well into the year 2000, using Arachne for internet (or as my friend called it, the "Fred Flintstone web browser"), only launching Win3.11 only when I needed to. Skipped '95, and was a late adopter of 98. Looking at my Win7 install date, it looks I ditched XP only in 2013 (edit: had 2003 as a typo). Which is pretty fast for my usual standards, I suppose. And it was only this year that I finally bought myself a laptop (costing a whole $200, pretty amazing what you get for that, though!)
Oh, and the cmd.exe oddity I was going to mention, kind of random but.. I had made a few desktop shortcuts to cmd.exe that start in various directories for my different projects. What seems really strange to me is that in one of them, if I open it and type "cd.." I get the "'cd..' is not a recognized command etc." error message. Typing "cd .." (with space) works fine. "cd.." works fine everywhere else I've used it. Must be the folder name or something? It's only in "c:\proj\pic32\squeedo\" where that happens. It's not really what I'd consider a problem, I just don't get the logic behind that at all.
I've been pretty happy with Win 7 overall, really the only thing that pisses me off is that they took out the MIDI device options from the control panel. I used to think it was funny as hell that I could run my Squeedo synth mapped to a MIDI device, then in Windows XP I could select it as the system's MIDI-out device, so every old Windows game that uses MIDI would sound like my own custom chiptune thing. There was something strangely satisfying about playing canyon.mid in media player through that, heheh. But Microsoft had to go and take away my MIDI fun. Oh well, I guess if I went back I'd probably find lots of the stuff I haven't tried in while were probably 16-bit programs that wouldn't even work anymore, since I've gone to 64-bit. Of course any "serious" program that uses MIDI will let you select the device yourself, rather than only use the system default. I'm kind of afraid to see what else I'll lose if/when I go to Win10. My laptop is on 10, but I don't do much on it yet other than editing text.
Anyone else have any random windows 7 tips, it'd be interesting to hear. Doesn't have to be related to command-line stuff, that's kind of a small arena as it is. Any reason to not go to Windows 10? Yeah I know about the telemetry stuff everyone is up in arms about, that's documented everywhere already. But any other reason from anyone's experience?