...because it's an impenetrable tangle of GUIDs, deep hierarchies, and keys left behind by apps long uninstalled.

And for all intents and purposes you can pretend it doesn't exist, at this point.

I've opened up Regedit in the past year, but I work with a piece of benighted software that supports a weird but useful feature designed fifteen years ago when doing unfathomable things with the registry was something people did.

That was my point. The fact that you can fiddle with it to change undocumented stuff should not be brought up as something negative.

What are the alternatives? The UNIX way of dumping hidden config files in $HOME doesn't look any better.

These days XDG spec and most apps put things in ~/.config/, either as a single file or in their own subdirectory. It's easy to navigate and search, and apps can use whatever config format they want.

I'd argue that's preferable to a complicated hierarchy of obscurely named keys.

Might not look better, but I can copy all my settings from computer to computer, unlike the registry.

Also, the registry is used for a lot of stuff besides configs. So my experience on Windows is that you have to run the installers (=slow), rather than simply copying all the files to clone a system.

Plus, it tends to fragment all across the disk, or something like that, and your Windows system inevitably slows down over time. Maybe SSDs eliminate that problem; I (fortunately) haven't had to use Windows in quite a few years.

It's straightforward to copy the per-user software settings from one registry to another.

You can't copy full software installs like that, but it's not the fault of the registry. Installing typical software means affecting dozens of system settings all in different places. You can't easily copy linux software along with every setting it affects either. You're best off either reinstalling or copying the entire drive, both of which work on Windows.

Text files are for the most part readable. The registry can be ugly to work with, if you have to. (which seems to be less and less these days)

The last time I opened regedit was 2014.

No, that's not true--I did once in 2015 to make a game written in 1998 work.

I think we can lay this one to rest.

Capslock as Ctrl? That's a regedit.

Copying putty settings from one host to another? That's a regedit.

(Semi-) permanently disabling live scans from Windows Defender? That's a regedit.

I use SharpKeys to automate the keymapping process on Windows.

https://github.com/randyrants/sharpkeys

One of the first things I install on any new system. Gotta have my Caps Lock->Escape.

I did it few weeks ago - Windows still doesn't like having either IPSec endpoint behind NAT by default.