Ramblings of Narc

First off, apologies for the graphics-intensive post, but the subject matter demands it.

I’ve seen various pictures of desktops on the Internet, and they usually tend to be cluttered with a bunch of icons, sometimes clustered in such a way as to suggest organization, sometimes not so much.

What I haven’t really seen (well, I haven’t looked very much, either) is what I have:

Presenting… the icon-less desktop!

I assume that makes you think I use the start menu a lot? Far from it, my friend. I happen to consider the Start Menu “no man’s land”, for “those few brave souls who’ve dared to enter it… have never come back”. Instead, what I have is…

The auto-hiding Quick Launch (and more) toolbar. The icons up there are the tools I tend to use the most, though not in that order (or any order, really). The very important ones (for work) are Cygwin (for starting vpnc), PuTTY, and WinSCP. There’s also a Komodo Edit icon, but I don’t really use it — it’s my default editor, anyway, so who needs the extra link?

Because it’s the Quick Launch bar, most installers ask if I want an icon there, so it gets mostly the same type of mileage as the Desktop would. But wait, what’s that over to the right? Could it be…?

That’s right, it’s the Desktop. Now cleanly organized in menu/drawer-like fashion, it still has all those other links I might need once in a while (like, a My Computer to right-click), and can also be used to drag the icons from those applications whose installers don’t ask if you want an icon on the QuickLaunch bar.

There’s one minor problem, though — with this setup, the Recycle Bin tends to try to open automatically if you hover your mouse over it. And if it’s full of a whole lot of stuff, that’ll take a while. Plus, you don’t really see it, do you? Thus, that “Special” folder, er, “on” the Desktop.

It’s the source of a toolbar that sits right next to the Start button (didn’t notice it, did ya?) that contains only a shortcut to the Recycle Bin. So you can see it when it’s full, and can right-click, Empty away.

There’s also a pretty direct mapping between the Games folder and the Games toolbar/menu, but I suspect that’s obvious.

What I love about this is the fact that there are no desktop icons. I rarely see the desktop, anyway (outside of the times when I’m taking screenshots of it, of course), so it’s useless to keep anything there. And the background picture doesn’t get all cluttered up, either. What do you think?