More Answers
Josh
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Yes. You are never supposed to touch it as a normal user. Only experienced people should be messing with the registry. If you were to make a mistake in it, your machine could never boot Windows again until you completely reinstalled it. No joke.
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thebonehead
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It wasn't designed for "end users".
The Control panel was, that's why you have a nice GUI for those items.
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JDT
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It has to be the way it is - with its very rigid hierarchical structure because for most people, 99-100% of additions and changes are going to be done programatically by software.
That means the overall structure has to be very simple and rigid to avoid installing a program and having it affect other applications or Windows itself.
Every programmer who writes Windows software that uses the registry has to know where to locate settings it needs and where to write their own settings in the registry. IMO the current Windows Registry structure is surprisingly friendly for a part of the system that most people never see. If you have some basic understanding you can usually find settings and keys without knowing in advance the exact location.
If you think the Registry is unfriendly, find an old Windows 3.1 machine and count the INI files in c:\windows. Those INI files could have any structure the programmer wanted. Great for the programmer, but evil for the user who wanted to tweak stuff.
Microsoft knows what they are doing in this area and have even gone so far as to make free stuff like TweakUI and other PowerToys that will handle common registry tweaks without your needing to open Regedit.
http://www.microsoft.com/win
dowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.m
spx
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lordpil
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What makes you think it is so un-user-friendly? It is designed to be accessed via the Windows API. Regedit is just a convenient GUI to access it. There are some alternatives out there that have more powerful search features and such. Anyone can write an app to display the registry contents like regedit.
The registry itself all in all is a good thing. I've never been a huge fan of the UNIX model of a bunch of files everywhere, the registry provides a central location to access all settings, at least, assuming your application uses it.
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kpk02
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Theroetically, any part of the registry that we would need to touch would be available as an easy-to-use GUI interface. When you use the Control Panel to make changes, it's taking your simply clicks and modifying the registry to apply your changes. Many of the simple tasks you can do in Windows to adjust settings actually so the registry changing for you.
I say theroetically, because there are useful registry tweaks and hacks that we as users might want to do. Still, often someone has come up with a an easy utility to make those tweaks simple. Tweaking programs like TweakUI and X-Setup do this sort of thing.
In a way, they did make the registry user friendly but they also give us the option to view it in it's unfriendly entirety.
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