Quicksilver changed how I use the Mac when I transition over from a PC. Quicksilver made everything make sense. I think my favorite thing at the time was the customizable global shortcuts, and being able to just start typing the name of some thing and launch it. Instead of having 1 million icons in shortcuts on the on the dock just the few that I always used.

On PC in the early 2000s I started customizing the windows xp shell because it was so basic. I used something few people have probably used: Geoshell.

It was a skinnable replacement for the windows UI with various plug-ins to customize functionality. I guess it was similar to what was available in Linux at the time as far as the window manager. It was also more stable since explorer wasn’t also handling all of the UI tasks.

I think my record for uptime was like 47 days on Windows XP without having to reboot. Granted, things got kind of funky and it wasn’t perfect.

I even learned how to make my own skins, which at the time was pretty difficult to do in windows xp.