Several years ago, while still on XP, I had trouble with windows explorer periodically slowing down my machine for a few dozen seconds, sometimes a whole minute. Also, it took quite a long time to display directory trees even in total commander, until I turned the icons off.
Then I thought, WTF - the icons are cached, aren't they? Well, yes and no. They are cached, but it doesn't matter. A brief inspection with then filemon.exe discovered that windows is still looking up the original icons somewhere in its intestines every time a directory display was refreshed. The WE process was consuming hefty 32 megs, which wasn't much, but hey, just a simple directory display, which shouldn't take more than a few kilobytes per se, takes up 32M?
So I started looking for an alternative shell. After a few false starts (namely, things that are repackaging of WE), I settled on bblean. The nice thing with it is that it has no desktop. Or, it has four, but no icons on it. For launching whatever I need, I use launchy. Which is quite fine - it indexes my disk, but not blindly as the search on the Vista or W7 do, it indexes only the directories I tell it to, for file types I tell it to. So that's a lean and mean combination. And, of course, for file manipulation (including file viewing (regardless of file type - doesn't require any software to be registered for each type), file compare, directory synchronization, and FTP), the total commander.
So, how can I live with no icons on my desktop?
First off, I think icons belong into a church (orthodox christian, for that matter, they invented them). Icons may be fine on a webpage, or on a small system where you have a few file types, not too many files per directory, and do only a few kinds of things. For anything bigger, you need a better system of knowing where your things are. And icon isn't telling you much - it's only a typecast. It is bound to a file type, so all the files you created with the same program share the same icon. If you write text, you may write dozens of types of text - three kinds of poetry, short and long stories, a novel, a travel log, some notes... and they're all the same type, same icon. Icon also doesn't help the program at all - windowses use the file extension to know which program opens your file, and which icon to draw. So you have to get your stuff organized differently. The directory structure is versatile and flexible enough for that, you just need to invent a system for yourself and (most important!) stick to it rigorously.
What about the desktop? Isn't it just another directory that one can use?
Yes it is, but... meh. First, you don't know exactly where it is. In WE, it looks as if your whole computer is inside your desktop, while your common sense tells you the opposite (and it's right). There are other virtual folders, which only point to some locations on your disk. You may notice that, when you dive into one of these (usually starting with "My ...") and then start going up, up, up - you don't end up at the place where you started from. That's virtual folders - it looks like a directory inside the current one, but it's somewhere else. You go there, and you don't know how to go back. Unless you are a devoted connoisseur of the area, and are willing to have your secret knowledge made obsolete with the next version, when they reorganize it again.
Which is why I keep "my documents" somewhere else (tried to do it with the whole profile as well, but that was a minor disaster - there's always one more component of the system that ignores the system level settings and uses the hardcoded locations instead - windows is still not quite ready to play on multiple disks at the same time). In case of a system crash (and it will happen, sooner or later), they don't have to sink with the ship.
Still, what's wrong with having icons on the desktop?
You need to see them to use them. And, the more stuff you put on your desktop, the more trouble it is to find the one you need. If you lay them down using some grouping, windows will rearrange them alphabetically every time you change screen resolution (or, in older windowses, on a whim). Or you can line up the more important ones in toolbars (which are actually folders in the desktop folder) - which is fine if you use them that way most of the time; if you want to access them directly, you have to open the folder first. Or you can do what most people do, line them around the edges of the desktop, and keep the windows of the programs you run never quite full width or height, so your icons are always at hand. I've seen many people do this - did myself, once long ago. Or you can just type win+m, minimize all windows, so you can see the desktop, find the icon you want, click it, then alt-tab until you find which was that other window you needed.
In all these cases, you are working your way against this major hurdle: you need to see the icons, but the program you are using is in the way. So you accommodate this paradigm by little tricks - keep the icons small and on the edge, or give them a piece of your screen (in GUI slang, "real estate", no less), or do some serious clicking to flip between showing the desktop and showing your work. You don't let your work spread over the whole screen - you keep it somewhat shrunk, for the sake of that moment when you may want to click an icon.
Try Launchy, really. You don't need to flip anything, you don't need no friggin icons. Just, at any moment, press alt+space and type a key or two. The list is under serious MRU, or rather MFU (most frequently used), so the things you use the most come up first, at just one or two keystrokes. It can index your documents as well, in those folders you set up so.
I did all this about five years ago, and life is nice. The only ugly thing, which happens from time to time, is when I sit at a different machine, which still uses windows explorer. Ah, and the file selector dialog, which is still WE in sheep's skin.
Then I thought, WTF - the icons are cached, aren't they? Well, yes and no. They are cached, but it doesn't matter. A brief inspection with then filemon.exe discovered that windows is still looking up the original icons somewhere in its intestines every time a directory display was refreshed. The WE process was consuming hefty 32 megs, which wasn't much, but hey, just a simple directory display, which shouldn't take more than a few kilobytes per se, takes up 32M?
So I started looking for an alternative shell. After a few false starts (namely, things that are repackaging of WE), I settled on bblean. The nice thing with it is that it has no desktop. Or, it has four, but no icons on it. For launching whatever I need, I use launchy. Which is quite fine - it indexes my disk, but not blindly as the search on the Vista or W7 do, it indexes only the directories I tell it to, for file types I tell it to. So that's a lean and mean combination. And, of course, for file manipulation (including file viewing (regardless of file type - doesn't require any software to be registered for each type), file compare, directory synchronization, and FTP), the total commander.
So, how can I live with no icons on my desktop?
First off, I think icons belong into a church (orthodox christian, for that matter, they invented them). Icons may be fine on a webpage, or on a small system where you have a few file types, not too many files per directory, and do only a few kinds of things. For anything bigger, you need a better system of knowing where your things are. And icon isn't telling you much - it's only a typecast. It is bound to a file type, so all the files you created with the same program share the same icon. If you write text, you may write dozens of types of text - three kinds of poetry, short and long stories, a novel, a travel log, some notes... and they're all the same type, same icon. Icon also doesn't help the program at all - windowses use the file extension to know which program opens your file, and which icon to draw. So you have to get your stuff organized differently. The directory structure is versatile and flexible enough for that, you just need to invent a system for yourself and (most important!) stick to it rigorously.
What about the desktop? Isn't it just another directory that one can use?
Yes it is, but... meh. First, you don't know exactly where it is. In WE, it looks as if your whole computer is inside your desktop, while your common sense tells you the opposite (and it's right). There are other virtual folders, which only point to some locations on your disk. You may notice that, when you dive into one of these (usually starting with "My ...") and then start going up, up, up - you don't end up at the place where you started from. That's virtual folders - it looks like a directory inside the current one, but it's somewhere else. You go there, and you don't know how to go back. Unless you are a devoted connoisseur of the area, and are willing to have your secret knowledge made obsolete with the next version, when they reorganize it again.
Which is why I keep "my documents" somewhere else (tried to do it with the whole profile as well, but that was a minor disaster - there's always one more component of the system that ignores the system level settings and uses the hardcoded locations instead - windows is still not quite ready to play on multiple disks at the same time). In case of a system crash (and it will happen, sooner or later), they don't have to sink with the ship.
Still, what's wrong with having icons on the desktop?
You need to see them to use them. And, the more stuff you put on your desktop, the more trouble it is to find the one you need. If you lay them down using some grouping, windows will rearrange them alphabetically every time you change screen resolution (or, in older windowses, on a whim). Or you can line up the more important ones in toolbars (which are actually folders in the desktop folder) - which is fine if you use them that way most of the time; if you want to access them directly, you have to open the folder first. Or you can do what most people do, line them around the edges of the desktop, and keep the windows of the programs you run never quite full width or height, so your icons are always at hand. I've seen many people do this - did myself, once long ago. Or you can just type win+m, minimize all windows, so you can see the desktop, find the icon you want, click it, then alt-tab until you find which was that other window you needed.
In all these cases, you are working your way against this major hurdle: you need to see the icons, but the program you are using is in the way. So you accommodate this paradigm by little tricks - keep the icons small and on the edge, or give them a piece of your screen (in GUI slang, "real estate", no less), or do some serious clicking to flip between showing the desktop and showing your work. You don't let your work spread over the whole screen - you keep it somewhat shrunk, for the sake of that moment when you may want to click an icon.
Try Launchy, really. You don't need to flip anything, you don't need no friggin icons. Just, at any moment, press alt+space and type a key or two. The list is under serious MRU, or rather MFU (most frequently used), so the things you use the most come up first, at just one or two keystrokes. It can index your documents as well, in those folders you set up so.
I did all this about five years ago, and life is nice. The only ugly thing, which happens from time to time, is when I sit at a different machine, which still uses windows explorer. Ah, and the file selector dialog, which is still WE in sheep's skin.
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