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Comment by bgro | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how people figure out what registry entries to make out of the ether for certain changes.

I don't know why most programs have an in-program settings menu, an external settings.json or something similar, and then registry entries to configure similar things.

I don't know why Windows has almost 0 policing about programs editing the registry. If you uninstall a program, why is it so hard to remove all entries? Why do entries usually from deleted programs sometimes turn into random strings of characters?

The whole thing reminds me of developers installing to %APPDATA% without my agreement, because they want to circumvent getting admin permissions. That's the whole point of admin permissions. Also if I don't want everything installed on my C drive, because it's a smaller sized SSD, I'm just out of luck.

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You can move %appdata% - kind of:

https://superuser.com/questions/1250288/can-i-move-my-appdat...

I don't understand the rest, to be honest. For many years, the mess was even larger, because config files were coupled with the software itself.

> I don't understand how people figure out what registry entries to make out of the ether for certain changes.

Experience, trial and error, documentation, reverse engineering... you can use something like ntregmon to see everything a program touches in the registry and work from there. The quantity can be overwhealming and when you finally whittle it down you realise what you want isn't there, it was in a .ini in a random 90's file path the whole time.

This is mindboggling to me. One of the richest companies in thew world just leaves this janky partially documented mess for developers to wade through like mud.

How can MS claim to hire 'the best of the best' when such a commonly interfaced piece of their product is garbabe?

Why isn't it refactored to be clear, concise, with simple documentation and tutorials?

If we were to be cynical we could say 'they don't want you to because competitive this-or-that' - ok, money would be a reason. But it's not that. It's just a turd.

Mac is a bit similar, in that it's hard to find what goes where and why, with all of the examples.

The entire development world before mobile I think had this anti-product attitude: they don't give a s**. You're 'stupid' for not having it figured out. The 'documentation is there!' (but really only in some obscure way). People move on, nobody cares. Who in MS has the job to 'care' about such a thing anyhow?

These kinds of things drive me bananas. These are the biggest and richest corporations to ever exist. It should be clear, documented, with tutorials, examples and searchable.

backwards compatibility. that's why.

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