Crítica a una completa filosofía de la impiedad

out in search of their alternatives to exercise more power and control over the desktop.

DESKTOP

CUSTOMISATION

button. If you’re running a Windows 7 or 8.1 system, you might start envying the design of the new Start Menu which also includes Cortana on Windows 10. Start Menu Reviver 2.0 does a good job in replicating the Start Menu from Windows 10 but sadly doesn’t include a Cortana-like assistant. Instead, you will only be able to search everything on your com-puter. The design is defi-nitely a complete revamp of the Start Menu from

Win-dows 7. You can add apps and arrange the layout of the tiles on the fly. It also includes a column of useful shortcuts such as My Computer, Control Panel, Network, etc on the left, reducing the number of steps required to access them. The tiles aren’t only restricted to software and applications, you will be able to assign dedicated tiles to your favourite websites also.

This tool is unnecessary if you’re already on Windows 10, but certainly will turn out to be quite useful on Windows 8.1 and lower operating systems.

http://dgit.in/StartMenuRev

AquaSnap

Windows snap to a pre-defined size on the desktop area to variable sizes of windows, a feature first seen on Windows 7 which eventually improved in Windows 10. AquaSnap further enhances the snapping feature by giving you freedom to snap a maximum of four windows to the entire desktop which is one quarter of the screen. Inside this tool, an interesting option called AquaMagnet makes the windows act as magnets towards each other and the edges of the screen (which can be enabled individually) and here, you can also change the distance at which the windows are attracted. After enabling this feature, AquaGlue lets you group certain windows, appearing as if they have been glued together. You can resize the entire group of win-dows while they are snapped to the edges according to your needs. Once grouped, you can move the snapped windows together as a group anywhere Start Menu Reviver replicates the Start Menu from

Windows 10, adding more customisation

on the screen. While working on multiple windows, you could be accessing data on more than two windows. AquaGlass will let you turn any window transparent, making the content visible even when the window overlaps the other and it also has a changeable transparency level. If you want a window to always stay on top of the rest, you can enable AquaShake. This feature can be activated by holding the window and giving it a sudden shake.

AquaStretch makes it easier to maximise a window horizontally, vertically or diagonally to the edge of the display.

http://dgit.in/AquaSnapWin

Dexpot

Virtual desktops emulate the sense of working on multiple desktops where you can switch between vir-tual screens and manage files and folders individually on each of these virtual screens.

Already present on Windows 10, the Dexpot tool extends the virtual desktop feature to your older Windows 7/8/8.1 system, so that you can also AquaSnap makes it easier to manage too many open windows on your desktop

Dexpot makes it possible to have virtual desktops

work on a clutter-free desktop. Using Dexpot is child’s play and after instal-lation, an icon will appear in the taskbar by which you can switch between four different virtual desktops. The maximum number of virtual desktop can be pushed to 20 but incrementally it takes a toll on your system per-formance. You can also tinker around with the advanced features to select different type of views for the virtual desktops. A helpful add-on called Windows Catalog displays all the virtual windows in a single instance and lets you drag applications across any virtual desktop. It gives more granular control over assigning shortcuts to tasks such as switching between vir-tual desktops, moving a certain window to a particular desktop, changing transparency level etc. Dexpot supports official plugins to further expand the capabilities of the tool.

http://dgit.in/DexpotWin

Switcher 2.0

After opening a number of windows on your desktop, it becomes quite frustrating to search for a specific window. Switcher 2.0 makes switching between applications and windows easier by displaying all the windows in a numbered grid, so that you can select the desired one. The tool will let you select the pattern in which you want your apps to be displayed. Of course, you can change the pattern to random sized tiles, dock or proper grids. You can assign your own shortcut to activate the task view as long as it doesn’t conflict with the existing shortcuts of the operating system. You’ll

Switcher 2.0 ensures you don’t find it frustrating to locate a particular window

get complete control over the appearance right from the font to the colour scheme. You’re also offered certain advanced features to edit the delay of the animations, size of the grids, etc. Tweaking them might mess up the existing values but you don’t need to worry about them if you are comfortable with the default setting. Albeit, if you end up entering erroneous values, you’ll be able to revert back to the original settings in one single click.

http://insentient.net/

ConEmu

It’s about time that certain long-awaited changes were incorporated into the command prompt on Windows. Before the updated command prompt on Windows 10, you couldn’t resize the window since you were restricted to the screen buffer of 80, nor you could select the text with your cursor, leaving no room for copy and paste commands. This made it difficult while entering complicated commands. ConEmu is the default Windows command prompt functioning on steroids, featuring tabbed sessions, multiple consoles and a very high level of customisation compared to the improved one on Windows 10. This tool includes a number of extra features, enabling you to run many GUI apps in tabs for debugging, code checking and other services. You can even split tabs into different screens and you can navigate across them. The freedom of customisation on ConEmu is endless, serving you with control in minuscule tasks. If you’re a frequent user of Notepad++, you can launch the software inside a tab and further split the screen if you wish.

http://dgit.in/ConEmuWin

AutoHotkey

Shortcuts prove quite useful to get things done quickly. The number and variations of shortcuts present on the desktop screen is limited. To ramp up your productivity, AutoHotkey will bring in a lot of scripts, macro, short-cuts and more. This will enable its users to go all out crazy on assigning shortcuts according to their own preferences which will eventually reduce the time spent in opening up apps. Not just apps, but through scripting you’ll be able to set shortcuts to open your favourite folders with simple combinations of keystrokes. For example, if you access the Downloads folder of your system too frequently, you can assign the shortcut Windows Key + 1 to open the folder. Writing scripts might sound intriguing but it’s as simple as writing a note. The tool itself has an in-built help menu which gives you a short tutorial on how to create scripts and also explains the

various syntaxes. Your keystroke scripts will be stored in files with a .ahk extension. AutoHotkey is our favourite tool which will essentially speed up your time and make things easier.

https://www.autohotkey.com/

Winstep Nexus

Windows operating systems never sported a handy dock at the bottom as seen on the Mac operating system. Docks are useful if you prefer keeping your desktop clean from ugly looking icons. Winstep Nexus is a worthy option to check out if you plan on emulating the same on your Windows desktop. Apart from the default icons and shortcuts, the tool lets you insert links to any installed software on your system. It can be positioned any-where on the edges of the screen and it also supports multiple monitors.

You can change almost every aspect of the dock, right from its size to the theme and also the mouseover effects. It lets you pick different sounds for all the actions from a library and place several modules such as Clock, CPU Meter, RAM Meter etc. to display real-time data. Nexus comes on top over the other options solely because of the degree of customisation offered.

http://dgit.in/WinStepNexus

Ditto

It’s frustrating to lose out the last piece of text or image you had copied onto the clipboard. By default, Windows doesn’t retain your clipboard history but it can be achieved with third-party Clipboard tools. Ditto turns out to be the best one to offer features suited to maintain a list of all the items copied right since you switched on your system. Saved items can include text, images, html, custom formats etc. It has a simple and straightforward interface where you can search the required item across the history of previously copied items. One interesting feature about Ditto is that it can sync clipboards across multiple PCs.

http://dgit.in/DittoClip

XYplorer

In our quest of getting rid of the mundane default software shipped with Windows, we come across XYplorer, an alternative to the dull Windows Explorer. This tool has much more necessary features such as tabbed browsing and a file search engine powered by several parameters helping you to narrow down your search. Certain file formats or folders can be filtered using different colours, a feature which drives away the confusion

while scrolling down a big number of files. When you open up the Settings, you’ll be presented with more options to tweak around. Again, a high level of customisation is offered which is expected in this tool. Once, you start using XYplorer, you can never go back to the default Explorer ever.

http://dgit.in/XYplorer

TreeSize

Windows doesn’t include a hard drive space visualiser hence, you can’t precisely and easily determine which folder is taking up extra space. Tree-Size is a simple visualiser which lists out the drives and all the folders, specifying the amount of space occupied by each of them. In the presence of too many folders, this tool comes in handy when you plan on clearing out space in your hard drive but aren’t sure about which folder to remove.

This tool won’t just let you view your files but also let you cut, copy, delete, and move files, doubling as a simple file explorer as well.

http://dgit.in/TreeSizeVis

Hard drive space visualisers help you to determine the amount of space occupied by folders

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