this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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To say that Quicksilver completely changed the way I use computers is no exaggeration, but the crazy thing is: I'm not even a Mac user. It's easy for people to forget what an influential app this was back in the mid-2000s, and it spawned a small handful of clones over on the Linux side: Gnome Do, Kupfer, Synapse. (None on Windows, to my knowledge.) I'm really thankful to Quicksilver because this is such a sensible and powerful way to do so many things on a desktop, and Ctrl+Space has become my deep-seated muscle memory for "I need to do something..."
Quicksilver changed how I use the Mac when I transition over from a PC. Quicksilver made everything make sense. I think my favorite thing at the time was the customizable global shortcuts, and being able to just start typing the name of some thing and launch it. Instead of having 1 million icons in shortcuts on the on the dock just the few that I always used.
On PC in the early 2000s I started customizing the windows xp shell because it was so basic. I used something few people have probably used: Geoshell.
It was a skinnable replacement for the windows UI with various plug-ins to customize functionality. I guess it was similar to what was available in Linux at the time as far as the window manager. It was also more stable since explorer wasn’t also handling all of the UI tasks.
I think my record for uptime was like 47 days on Windows XP without having to reboot. Granted, things got kind of funky and it wasn’t perfect.
I even learned how to make my own skins, which at the time was pretty difficult to do in windows xp.
I had a similar sort of late-Windows phase before moving to Linux. While I don't think I knew about GeoShell, I would use shell replacements like LiteStep and various Blackbox clones. Customizing Windows and learning/comparing different UIs on the same system taught me concepts that made it an actual "light step" towards *nix. Sadly I don't have many screenshots from that time, and I've combed through boxshots to see if I posted any, but it looks like probably not. I did manage to find this one locally (probably from bbLean or bb4win):
Looks good man. I played with the same stuff trying to get windows to be more Linux like and not suck so much.
I remember being really proud of finding and configuring some desktop application that showed all the CPU usage, memory statistics, etc.
That, and like just adding functionality that you would think would be part of an OS like being able to control your music from someplace or customizable shortcuts.