I have been more and more conscious lately that I am a lazy software user.
By that I mean that I often use only a small fraction of a tool's capabilities, and that, very often, if those capabilities need a lot of configuration, or scripting, or even a lot of reading... then I often don't do the necessary legwork. I might even end up looking for a tool to do something that a program I already own would be able to do with some configuration or scripting.
Now I am sure I am not alone in this, but the strange thing is I ought to be perfectly capable of learning these and doing it (after all I made a good living as a developer before I started making a good living creating and running development teams), but in truth I don't.
Some examples:
Total Commander is my file manager of choice, and it has quite a powerful set of scripting and extension possibilities. I have seen what can be done with it. Yet in 10 years I have never tried to understand it, I had even never (until December 2006) bothered to create a custom menu in it, and never gone beyond installing a few of the plugins... I finally looked a tiny bit in December after someone posted some screenshots in here that showed some capabilities - but even then it was a few hours and then I parked it.
I have the wirekeys tool, which has a lot of features. Again, it can also be scripted. And yet, in the 3 or more years I have owned it I have never started to use more than a tiny fraction of the features, never written anything in it, and never done much more than trawling the help file for a few tweaks (like the file open/save dialog improvement plug in). There are zillions of shortcuts that I ought to try to remember because they would save me a lot of time and hassle, yet I dont. I know I ought to create a "cheat sheet" and learn a few ones every week... but I haven't.
Opera is highly customisable yet I only bothered once to download alternate menus/toolbars - at the moment the most customisation I do is changing the search.
I had ahk installed for about 2 months and did exactly nothing with it, so I removed it. I didn't even install some of the great ahk scripts available here, although I downloaded about 20
When I was looking at time tracking software I had to settle on one that would spy and record on my active windows, and then I would tag them, because no way I was going to set up all the kind of clients, categories etc. that the normal time trackers seemed to expect. I tested quite a few before realising that!
I own the stardock object desktop, and have had for years, but I have only once or twice tried to customise DesktopX or objectbar to create an environment that would suit my work and tasks. I know if I did it could be very cool and useful, but it is just a lot of work, so I haven't (actually i did an objectbar once and kept it for 2 months until I had to reinstall windows and realised I had never backed this bar config up).
...
You get the picture, it's just quite pathetic!
I guess I am at one extreme of the developer scale - the one who doesnt want his/her personal computer time to feel even remotely like work and likes simple tools that dont require too much configuration etc. The other extreme of the scale is the developer who likes to customise or write everything he/she uses.
I want my tool to be immediately useful out of the box, with a few simple adjustments. In all these cases and many others the tool is either good enough in its "immediate" form I will just stop using it, it will not give me the kick to learn it... If it is good enough out of the box I am more likely to never scratch the surface of what it could do with tweaking...
Launchers are a similar case. I have farr, and use it more as a search tool. I think I even installed and downloaded some of the plugins but never use them. And just like total commander and wirekeys, if I bothered to get used to using some of the features I am sure I would benefit. But I don't
Similarly I could set up a menu in Total Commander, but I dont (I started once, but too many programs). Or I could set them up in wirekeys (or stardock's keyboard launchpad and right click commander, i own that too) to make them into launch keys and right click menu. Or I could do an objectbar or desktopX instance. Or reinstall ahk. But instead I have gone out and found a launcher tool which suits lazy people like me, because it builds its menu by watching what i run, from all sources. Finally a menu that doesnt need work.
I do feel a bit ashamed that I am that lazy, but I guess I have so many other projects that I dont want tools that turn in projects. That's my excuse
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must try a bit longer
) - I know your pain!