Windows 11
My friends and colleagues often complain about Windows 11. Personally, however, I much prefer it to Windows 10. In particular, here are some standout features:
Windows Explorer now has tabs! Coming from macOS and Linux, I so missed explorer tabs that I added them to Windows 10 with a plugin. I still feel handicapped whenever I have to interact with an older Windows box that doesn't have them. But Windows 11 does. Next, please fix the inevitable hangs in Explorer, please.
Windows 11 includes a very useful clipboard manager! Just hit ❖-V instead of Ctrl-V, and select any of your previously copied snippets. I use this all the time, to copy items from multiple places into a common list. Or to share that link I copied half an hour ago.
The Windows 11 screenshot tool is hands-down the best screenshot tool of all the operating systems I know. Why? Because it captures the full screen content at the time of capture, including the mouse pointer, hover states, tooltips, and everything else. And it copies the capture immediately to the clipboard, ready to paste into documentation or notes. I hit ❖-⇧-S many times every day. Another useful feature is text recognition that is now part of the screenshot viewer and image viewer.
At work, I spend many hours every day in Microsoft Teams. Teams is not a high point in Microsoft's portfolio. But at least I can mute and unmute my microphone from anywhere in the OS with ❖-Alt-K. This is highly useful whenever I want to present something, without having to manually switch to Teams and back just to unmute myself. Oh, and after a year of waiting, the "new" Teams finally re-learned to spell-check more than one language at a time this year. About time.
Sometimes I have to annotate PDFs, especially for signing forms. Windows now includes a very competent little PDF annotator in Edge, of all places. It's not as good as macOS's Preview.app, or Okular. But hey, at least it's there.
A few weeks ago, my Surface tablet somehow broke its Windows installation and got stuck in a boot loop. System restore didn't work. Safe mode didn't work. Finally it booted me to a defeated screen saying "it seems you're f*cked". But right after that, the very new Quick Machine Recovery kicked in, re-downloaded a new copy of Windows, and recovered the machine and all my data. It took half an hour, but it worked perfectly.
I'll stop here. There are a few more notable features, but most of them are more widely known. For example, there's now a handy search feature in the Task Manager. The On-Screen Touch Keyboard is now almost as good as a mobile keyboard. The new Terminal app doesn't stink any more. the RDP client is faster and better-looking. And of course WSL keeps improving.
Next up, can I please have proper color management in the Windows shell, so app icons don't look all clownish on my wide-gamut monitor? It's 2025, and most new screens now come with decent DP3 support, so it's about time.
