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Now that I’m back on Windows and had to realize that all the alternate shells are dying (from Litestep to BBlean, from Xoblite to Serenade), I’m stocking up on shell toys:

• DropMyRights: I use Windows with an administrator account, but there are some apps I want to run as a restricted user: everyone does this the other way around (think sudo, uac and friends), but dropmyrights is very simple :) I launch Opera through it for example:
  “C:\Progra~1\DropMyRights\DropMyRights.exe” “C:\Progra~1\Opera\Opera.exe”
• StartKiller: it removes the start button and makes its corner (in a 10px x 10px square) clickable; less wasted space (Fitt’s Law, anyone?)
• PlacesBar Constructor: I modified my places bar (on Open/Save dialog boxes) so that it shows Favorites which I use to store links to files and dirs on my machine (I use Firefox and Opera for browsing). Combine it with SendToToys‘ “send to favorites” and you have a much more flexible dialog box. No Vista-like searchbar, but still much better than the original.
• AutoHotKey: apart from the disgusting syntax, coolest stuff ever; I’ll add a full post on it soon, because it’s so useful – it’s like windows scripting on steroids. Lot’s of steroids.
• VirtuaWin: finally a virtual desktop manager that 99% works, fast and is still maintained (unlike Virtual Dimension, which is my second favorite).

Besides being a brainless zombie nowdays, I finished fooling around with my computer and started to customize things here and there. First I wanted some rsync replacement, tried DeltaCopy which I found noobish and butt ugly; enter SyncBack: it is not just freeware, but has a simple and an advanced mode, easy to use, has a small memory footprint, so I really like it. Cool.

Another thing really annoys me is the Explorer shell: I used to make my own shells with Litestep (somewhat dead), but now I really want a more maintainable, not so destructive solution. Enter AutoHotkey: finally I can use the logo key plus the mouse to move around windows and of course with AutoHotkey one can really make magic. I think I’ll use it as a proxy for some LS features, but I plan to dig into it’s cryptic macro language.