Windows Explorer Through the Years

https://gekk.info/articles/explorer.html

by kleff • 6 years ago

186 182 6 years ago

wronex2• 6 years ago

I wish Windows Save/Open dialogues would have links to already open Explorer windows (much like the links to Documents.)

Rationale: Project are often contained in a single root folder. I often start by opening this folder in Explorer. Some programs can be started by double clicking files. Others cannot. Saving new files always requires interacting with the save dialog and thus browsing to the project folder again.

vbezhenar4• 6 years ago

That would be awesome feature.

You can copy directory path from explorer, paste it into open/save dialog and it'll navigate there. But your suggestion is much easier and intuitive to use.

Actually Explorer and open/save dialogs have some kind of recently used (or most used) directories. But they always contain some junk for me. Listing currently opened directories there could help without need to rework UI.

pjc505• 6 years ago

I'm reminded of the Acorn Archimedes: instead of a save dialog, saving produced a tiny "explorer" window containing the file, which you were expected to drag-and-drop to its save location.

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 6 years ago

RiscOS had some other interesting features, such as all menus being context menus. RoxOS was a short-lived experiment in bringing some RiscOS concepts to Linux, including AppDirs, only having context menus, and even the drag-to-save functionality.

TheSpiceIsLife6• 6 years ago

This is something MacOS has over Windows.

Dragging a folder from Finder into the safe file dialogue opens that folder in the dialogue.

You can also drag a search result from Spotlight in to the save file dialogue.

Also works with the open file dialogue.

throw67642• 6 years ago

In Windows, you can just copy the file path from Explorer and paste it into the save file dialog.

ubercow136• 6 years ago

That works with GTK and Qt file dialogs on Linux too

edwinyzh2• 6 years ago

I second your rationale because I always do that like you.

And the good news is that, you can achieve that with Listary. I'm using an old version of it due to few years ago I found that new versions do perform as fast as the old ones.

wronex2• 6 years ago

Thanks for the tip! Will give it a try.

compressedgas• 6 years ago

I like the idea and wrote a longer comment. But I must object to your two universal statements as they are without further qualification I find them false.

It is possible to start any program via a file association even if it does nothing with the file that the action was activated on.

Saving a new file only requires the file chooser if the application was started first. If the file is created in Explorer via the New ... Templates and then opened the use of the file chooser can be avoided.

WorldMaker13• 6 years ago

It's too bad Templates got flooded with junk back in the Windows 95 days and so people stopped using and Developers stopped creating Templates. OS/2's heartier version of Templates, I recall being extremely useful. Windows' Templates seem derelict and forgotten ruins of the ancients in Windows today.

gravislizard• 6 years ago

This feature is actually implemented in OS/2, which was a Microsoft project at one point. It came so close to reaching windows, and would have made the system common dialogs far more powerful.

vbezhenar4• 6 years ago

Sorry for offtopic, but I'd like to share a tip I can't imagine living without. You can type cmd in explorer address bar and it'll open cmd in that directory (probably works with any other program in your %PATH%). Also you can type `explorer .` in cmd to open explorer in the current directory.

gjhr• 6 years ago

You can also shift right click the background of an explorer window to open a terminal session (powershell or cmd depending on the release I think). If you need a administrator prompt you can do that from explorer's file menu in Windows 10.

TheSpiceIsLife6• 6 years ago

How did you happen upon this tidbit?

I imagine going through an actual book and doing all the exercises, or something similar like a course for Windows or whatever might cover it?

Kuinox• 6 years ago

Not the one you asked but i'll answer:

I discovered it myself: Most of the program like this one take a path to know where it should open.

I was searching how to open vscode is current folder ("code .") and figured you could do with a bunch of other tools, like cmd, gitextensions, powershell, explorer...

cstuder• 6 years ago

Another tip: Shift-Right-Click a file in Explorer and "Copy as path" will appear in the context menu.

Puts the full file path in your clipboard.

TheSpiceIsLife6• 6 years ago

Da fck.

I recently learned you can add this feature to the right click context menu via adding a registry entry.

If I’d’a known shift-right click I wouldn’t make bothered.

dgrin91• 6 years ago

Also in the Shift-Right-Click is open command prompt in directory. Nice symmetry there.

thrownaway954• 6 years ago

OMG!!! where have you been my whole life. you just saved me tons of stress when getting a file path in explorer

dlkmp• 6 years ago

You can also type "wt" and have Windows Terminal open your default shell (presuming Windows Terminal is installed). This makes it really convenient to access WSL wherever you need it.

pjc505• 6 years ago

I've always used "start ." in cmd to open explorer. "start" is kind of useful to know since it triggers the default action for a file, e.g. "start foo.txt" opens it in Notepad or whatever your default text editor is.

"start "."" however opens another cmd window. Consistency is not a strong point.

ygra2• 6 years ago

start uses the first quoted argument as the window title and with your example the actual argument is missing, hence you get a new console window.

LandR• 6 years ago

Also if you aren't on hte mouse, CTRL+L in the folder jumps the cursor to the address bar.

glaberficken5• 6 years ago

This also works in all modern browsers, I use this hundreds of time per day.

usrusr• 6 years ago

Thank god they finally copied this behavior from web browsers. I had a machine trapped on a Windows 8 until recently and lack of ctrl+l was infuriating! If you are "one of the 10000" about this today, don't beat yourself up about this, explorer's ctrl+l hasn't been around very long.

magicalhippo• 6 years ago

As does ALT+D, as with browsers.

Gaelan• 6 years ago

Equivalents on a Mac: drag a folder onto terminal's icon in the dock to open a shell there, and "open ." in a shell to open finder there.

for_xyz• 6 years ago

Since ribbon UI you can always add ribbon items to the quick access toolbar (right click -> add to quick access) which can be accessed by the alt + (item slot number)

I always used to add powershell and powershell (admin) from the File menu to the quick access toolbar which allows me to quickly open the powershell in the current folder via keybind (Normal ps: alt + 3, Admin ps: alt + 4)

I wish they would add new windows terminal and all user defined profiles to the file menu.

bserge• 6 years ago

This is a great tip, thank you!

I spent an hour trying to get "Open Command window here" back on Windows 10, to no avail... and it was this simple :D

AnonC2• 6 years ago

Windows Explorer has been so slow that I actively avoid using it and use the command prompt instead. Even on an SSD, opening a folder sometimes takes several seconds while Explorer scans that folder with a progress bar on the address bar (and does I-don’t-know-what in the background). I see this happening for downloads and many other folders.

I use Keypirinha, Everything, and other tools to get work done.

oblio4• 6 years ago

In many of those cases it's shell extensions installed by other apps that make Explorer slow. I forgot how you can check that, but you can.

anadem• 6 years ago

cat e.bat

  @echo %~f0
  @if %1. == . goto simple
  @rem explorer /e, %1
  explorer /e, %1
  @goto done
  :simple
  explorer /e,.
  :done

open Explorer from cmd prompt, either where you are or where you want it

ggus• 6 years ago

`start .` would also open the current directory. if memory doesn't fail me (I'm now a kubuntu user), start is the equivalent of double-clicking, so `start somefile.txt` would mimic double-click on somefile.txt, `start .` would double-click on the current directory, and so on

WorldMaker13• 6 years ago

Since the Ribbon was added in Windows 8 opening a shell in your Windows default shell option (which defaults to PowerShell in recent Windows 10 now, but can be swapped back to CMD) has been directly on the File menu-tab. This also means there's a direct keyboard shortcut (Alt+F,R or Alt+F,S for more options in Windows 10, including Alt+F,S,A to open an Admin PowerShell).

The Ribbon gets a lot of flak for seeming complex or ugly (including from this article), but it added a lot of sweet Power User tools in easy to find places, and everything keyboard shortcut-able, if you give it a chance.

thunderbong• 6 years ago

Another tip -

From the taskbar, you can middle-click on any preview window that pops up to close that window.

accrual• 6 years ago

Related and kind of interesting, the original File Manager was open sourced and recompiled for modern Windows.

https://github.com/microsoft/winfile

timvdalen• 6 years ago

Floating windows in floating windows, I can't believe I forgot that was ever a thing.

Jaruzel3• 6 years ago

It's called Multiple Document Interface (MDI) and in some instances can be quite useful. MS have completely depreciated it now to the extent that MDI apps no longer render their window chrome properly since Windows 7.

severak_cz• 6 years ago

Wow! It's interesting that somebody from Microsoft (Craig Wittenberg) still uses and maintains this!

frou_dh• 6 years ago

My pet peeve with every GUI file browser I can remember using: They all try to be smart and occasionally ignore your carefully configured view settings.

I want a massive checkbox that says "Never, EVER, try to automatically determine the best viewing mode. Really. Never!"

TheSpiceIsLife6• 6 years ago

The best viewing mode is detailed.

Everything else should be regulated out of existence.

</rant>

speedgoose• 6 years ago

The best view to sort pictures !

ptidhomme• 6 years ago

Starting in Windows 8 :

The Ribbon is unspeakably messy, and unspeakably large, and as I said I am not going to attack it in detail because this is a long-running Microsoft hobby horse. Suffice to say I feel it is a usability disaster and does not belong in any program let alone Explorer, however, it has the one saving grace that it is both collapsible, and defaults to that state, so most users almost certainly never even found out it existed, making this a lean, usable Explorer wrapped in a weirdly noisy border.

I always find this ribbon to be incredibly ill-designed, may it be in Explorer or in MS Office : the biggest icons I almost never use whereas the ones I use most are painfully small (font management in MS Word to cite but one).

Arainach• 6 years ago

I find the Ribbon's contextual options perfect. When I'm at the root of My Computer, it's useful to see "Map Network Drive". When I'm in any other location, I don't care about that, so it's gone. When I click on a ZIP file it's useful to see options for extraction, etc.

The Ribbon is far more useful for new users. It's true that if you memorized the Excel 97 menu layout you may not find things exactly where they were, but most users would never have been able to find things they wanted in the menu anyway.

My experience is that people who complain about the ribbon largely use keyboard shortcuts (which still exist) anyway, if they've even used Windows in the last decade.

Lammy3• 6 years ago

Maybe people will like the Ribbon more if reminded that it replaced an MSIE-powered sidebar.

ketzu• 6 years ago

After reading this comment, I opened up my explorer to notice, there is a ribbon there. In the default overview it actually has some buttons I would use (but it's the small ones) as I don't regularly add network mounts or addresses.

I think I ignored it after having no use for it in the beginning (and as my usual operations in the explorer are mostly navigation based).

Joeri• 6 years ago

I get a sense the ribbon design is a bit aspirational, with emphasis on the things they think you should use instead of what is actually used. For example, I’m sure they feel you should be using styles instead of fonts, and so the styles control takes up a lot more real estate than the font chooser.

oblio4• 6 years ago

Well, you should be using styles. It's just that most people like micromanaging document looks and can't be bothered to create new styles.

WorldMaker13• 6 years ago

Some of the Ribbon Designs are aspirational, but also some of the Ribbon Designs are simply telemetry-based, with an emphasis on the things users do most. I'm rarely surprised how many people complaining that the things they use most aren't well emphasized are also among the first to disable telemetry.

The intersection of the aspirational and telemetry-based approaches is something of the "Office 20% Rule". The long standing aphorism is that everybody only uses about 20% of the features of a given Office application, but that everybody's 20% is different. That "Rule" is exactly why the Ribbon will never be "perfect" in what it emphasizes, it can only aspire to try its best given the goals it has (aspirations) and the data available (telemetry).

orbital-decay• 6 years ago

I've found it to be great for mouseless control. Try hitting Alt to get the vimperator-like navigation based on labeled popups.

I think this approach is much better for power users than the old combo hotkeys - it's explorable, customizable, and memorizable at the same time, so you can both learn it easily and be productive.

ghusbands• 6 years ago

Maybe somebody here knows - is there a ribbon search that shows you where to find something in the ribbon (especially in Office)? It has a search box that lets you just run the thing you've searched for, but that doesn't really help you find it in future. It at least shows you the icon, so you can then hunt through all the ribbons for that icon, but that's hardly ideal.

open-source-ux• 6 years ago

"Windows 98 was famously controversial, at least in nerd circles, for the integration of Internet Explorer into Explorer itself"

How interesting to see attitudes change. Today, using a web browser and HTML/CSS/JavasScript to write your app (whether as a SaaS app or a desktop app using Electron) is one of the most popular options for creating apps.

In fact, Microsoft explored this space many years ago too. Remember Microsoft Money 2000? A desktop app with an interface akin closer to a web page than a traditional desktop GUI. Microsoft called it Inductive User Interface:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/appuistart/in...

grandchild• 6 years ago

And then there was Active Desktop. I remember setting an HTML file as desktop wallpaper, so I could have an animated wallpaper. :)

(Why I wanted my wallpaper to visually distract me at every step is beyond me today, but I had fun.)

theandrewbailey• 6 years ago

All I remember about Active Desktop is how it would make everything slower. I would convert JPG images to BMP before setting them as desktop wallpaper, because JPG would require Active Desktop turned on (along with its slowness), BMP didn't.

forgotpwd163• 6 years ago

I was using it to read RSS, show some network info such as external IP and have a text field which could be used as a notepad. It was superseded by the arguably better designed, but more resource intensive, gadget system.

nfoz• 6 years ago

How interesting to see attitudes change. Today, using a web browser and HTML/CSS/JavasScript to write your app (whether as a SaaS or a desktop app using Electron) is one of the most popular options for creating apps.

I'm not sure that's a change. The IE integration was what the MS developers wanted, against the wishes of nerd-users. Electron apps today are very popular for developers, and nerd-users constantly complain about it.

toyg5• 6 years ago

This * 1000.

Users are not clamouring for HTML apps (and really never have - most users get annoyed by inconsistent and mutating interfaces), it's just a way for developers to save money and time. End of.

boomlinde• 6 years ago

is one of the most popular options for creating apps.

...and still one of the less popular options for using an app

badsectoracula3• 6 years ago

Weeeeelll... Windows 98 Explorer wasn't really an HTML/CSS/JavaScript application, AFAIK the HTML/JS side mainly contained an ActiveX control that exposed the same shell control that was used in the Win95 explorer and file dialog.

WorldMaker13• 6 years ago

IE even supported HTA ("Hyper-Text Application") a file format that absolutely was a direct precursor to both Electron and modern day PWAs.

efreak7• 6 years ago

HTA is still supported. So is WSH using either vbscript or jscript (unfortunately, powershell has replaced WSH for new functionally, rather than supporting both. Afaik there's no way to manage hyper-v or other newer features from WSH)

CrlNvl• 6 years ago

And still no tabs. I know about Clover, QTTabbar (my current choice) and Groupy, but it still blows my mind we've had tabs in web browsers for nearly 20 years and not in local explorers.

jerrygoyal• 6 years ago

I found TidyTabs much better.. less visual clutter and small memory footprint

WorldMaker13• 6 years ago

The Sets experiment (heterogeneous tabs for nearly every Windows title bar) from the Windows team was really cool. I was sad that I was never in one of the Insider cohorts to directly test it.

It's unfortunate their testing feedback decided not to move forward with it, and that also the engineering complexities that happened because Edge switched to Chromium and would no longer be able to maintain some of the things Sets relied upon.

Rumors (er, GitHub Issues) have it PowerToys might explore the idea again some day.

skrause• 6 years ago

The Windows NT4/95 Explorer was the best because I could actually configure the exact same details view everywhere and the Explorer would remember and keep my settings.

Actually respecting the user's settings is something modern Microsoft doesn't view as important anymore.

gsich• 6 years ago

You can still do that.

mschuetz• 6 years ago

I can highly recommend altap salamander. It's an incredibly useful two panel file manager. You can switch between detail view and a big picture preview with alt+3 and alt+5. You can select folders/files with space, and in case of folders it will also show you the total file size of that folder. It has icons for available drives in a toolbar, and you can configure the F4 key so that it opens the focused file with an editor of your choice, notepad++ in my case.

axegon_• 6 years ago

Here's a fun story: I stopped using Windows when I was 12, almost 20 years ago but Windows explorer was something I used 2000 times a day and I got so used to opening it with win+e that even till this day I set this shortcut to open Nautilus.

glaberficken5• 6 years ago

Muscle memory is a bitch. I'm primarily on Windows, but whenever I need to install and mess with Linux the first thing I do is find a way to make the window manager tile to half screen with "Win+arrows". Cannot live without that shortcut.

galacticdessert• 6 years ago

Yeah me too. I have to say that even if I love Linux and run it on all my personal machines, the keyboard shortcuts of Windows tend to be much more effective than let's say KDE or Gnome. Control+shift+N to make new folders, win + arrows to move and snap windows, Win+L to lock, etc. are quite ergonomic. As a comparison, KDE defaults to f10 to make a new folder (terrible as far to reach, and usually mapped to a multimedia key on laptops), and has no default keybindings to move windows

signal112• 6 years ago

This article would be even better if it showed the evolution of Mac OS's Finder through the years. The two undoubtedly influenced each other (possibly with one side being influenced more than the other).

For instance, I believe the 'duality' of Explorer views (one without tree views, one with) was a response to the success of the Mac Finder -- it was intended to present a simple UI for managing files. The "Explore" mode was a power-user interface that needed you to right-click and choose Explore, or press Win+E (or create a permanent shortcut). To be fair, because right-clicking was new in Windows 95, the help materials did emphasize right-clicking. As the article below indicates, the Win95 team did consider designing an entire 'Beginner UI' for beginner users, but eventually dropped the idea.

This article[1] (it has previously been on HN before) has some interesting insights on the design of Windows 95 with respect to Explorer. Bear in mind, one of Win95's design goals was to be usable for both those new to computers as well as power users.

Beginning users and many intermediates were confused by the two-pane view of File Cabinet. (See Figure 3.) They were unsure of the relationship between the panes and how to navigate between folders. Beginners were often overwhelmed by the visual complexity of the File Cabinet and had more basic problems, such as not understanding how folders could exist inside of other folders. Many users were also confused by the Parent Folder icon. It appeared in every folder and looked like a file, yet was really a navigation control for moving up the hierarchy one level.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/238386.238611

Edit:

[For Windows 8+, referring to the icons at the top of the toolbar] Microsoft remains absolutely addicted to the idea of a toolbar with "commonly used" commands on it. Despite the clear internal order to get rid of all these toolbars, someone insisted that they had to remain, had to, and so they got stuffed into the titlebar.

Given that Explorer took the "Ribbon" idea from Office 2007 (probably because Steven Sinofsky had a hand in both), the icons at the top of the toolbar are much more likely to be Explorer's implementation of Office's Quick Action Toolbar. In fact, looking at Office 365 UI, there seems to be a trend of bundling more functionality into the Title Bar these days.

toyg5• 6 years ago

> Beginning users and many intermediates were confused by the two-pane view of File Cabinet

Definitely my experience as a pre-teen. The 9x UI was much more intuitive.

there seems to be a trend of bundling more functionality into the Title Bar these days.

Yes and I find it annoying, because 1) they are so small, and 2) now you cannot intuitively know whether something on the titlebar is a button or decoration. Flat UIs suck.

basch• 6 years ago

For anyone looking for a Norton Commander / File Cabinet two pane interface, check out Saladin. https://saladin.mimec.org/

narag• 6 years ago

...such as not understanding how folders could exist inside of other folders

I find this bit apalling. Some users were confused by that. So what? Do you take away the concept of nesting directories altogether because beginners are confused? They didn't, but we've being suffering a sneaky war on treeview for twenty five years. Every version it's more difficult to tweak the file explorer back to 95, losing some features forever. Real state is consumed by ribbons, quick access, libraries, all kind of stuff that's hard to delete if at all possible.

Last annoyance (it's also the shell, but not exactly the FM) is the taskbar hover previews. If you make the mistake to let the mouse over some app icon in the taskbar, a pop-up window appears over your current window showing a preview of the iconized application. There used to be a hack to disable that crap, setting a high delay for the hover. They've removed that with an automated update.

efreak7• 6 years ago

Right-clicking was a thing in windows 3.x.

quyleanh• 6 years ago

And the endless question is: When we have fluent design UI version of Explorer?

rzzzt• 6 years ago

Treat yourself on the many takes of file explorer designs: https://dribbble.com/tags/file_explorer

magnio• 6 years ago

There's a UWP version called Files UWP: https://github.com/files-community/files-uwp

gruez• 6 years ago

I hope never. The leaks/concepts look awful.

6c696e75782• 6 years ago

Still not as good as Thunar.

Or XTree Gold/ZTree

ubercow136• 6 years ago

I like Thunar, but what particular features of Thunar are better?

6c696e75782• 6 years ago

For me, it's the lack of bloat. I just want to see a directory, I don't need the overhead that explorer.exe requires.

File browsing is all that's needed. What struck me as horrid in the 90s was just how much bloat there was which really pushed up the system requirements. Quite a few times I'd drop out of Windows and just do what I needed in xtree gold. Not because of a feature that it had, but because I could do it quicker. It had a hex viewer though which was nice.

I remember browsing through word docs in hex and spotting some system info that was embedded in the saved documents. Those were the days.

Thunar seems to present directories in a way that makes better use of screen space somehow, it doesn't seem to waste space quite so much. I can't really explain it very well, but it seems to get more information in less space. Feels faster too. Maybe just usablity.

edwinyzh2• 6 years ago

For document tabs, file tags, notes, and so on, can I recommend my DocxManager (https://docxmanager.com) for "File Manager for Word documents"?

helenius• 6 years ago

Interesting thing about File Explorer is that the 20-year-old APIs for extending it still work! While File Explorer has changed between Windows versions, the underlying Win32 API seems to be the same.

A year ago I dove into shell extensions [1] to implement a drag-and-drop gesture for a file type. I wanted to create a bookmarking system for files in File Explorer based on nothing more than the bookmark being named after the file I want to bookmark (so they're next to each other when sorted from A-Z) [2]. I had not used Visual C++ before but the tutorials I found from the early 2000s, and some helpful advice from MSFT via Stackoverflow, got me through it.

There is also a simpler way to write Shell extensions using a C# wrapper if that works for your use case [3].

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/shell-e... [2]: https://filemark.app/ [3]: https://github.com/dwmkerr/sharpshell

tangue• 6 years ago

I switched from Windows to OSX 15 years ago, the only thing I miss sometimes is the Windows Explorer, though it's not perfect it's really better.

FlorianRappl• 6 years ago

Could not agree more. Finder is a mess. Explorer just gets the job done.

dfox• 6 years ago

The article says that Windows 95 file explorer is not that deeply altered from File Manager. While this might be somewhat true in visual sense, it is completely different beast in what it does.

File Manager was just what it says on the tin and showed directories and files, while Explorer displays what is essentially an arbitrary graph of COM objects and allows you to call methods on them. One particularly notable point about that is that it is not that MS renamed directories to folders in Windows 95, these are names for two slightly different concepts. Directories are on filesystem, while folder is essentially anything that can be shown as explorer window (including desktop, control panel, various synthesized views of start menu contents, "god-mode menu"...).

pjc505• 6 years ago

Ah yes, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Master_Control_Panel_s...

The shortcut is implemented by creating a folder with the extension .{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Lammy3• 6 years ago

What about “Libraries”? I could never tell quite what they were trying to do.

WorldMaker13• 6 years ago

Libraries are great. They were intended to be a handy tool for casual Windows users, but unfortunately did not get the UX clear/simple enough for casual users so it got relegated to the Power User tools most people will ignore (and de-emphasized in Windows 10 to the point where it's mostly only Power Users left that will bother to find Libraries and activate it).

The attempted explanation from the article.

Windows 7 introduced this concept - Libraries, meta-spaces that grouped together multiple actual folders on the disk to create what database developers call a view. The Pictures location is not just a folder, it's potentially several folders. Don't worry about it, Windows will figure this out for you and simply present what you wish to see. An interesting idea I don't believe anyone wanted, or that in fact really worked at all.

Libraries work pretty great. There's still a few issues with them, mostly in specific applications that use older common dialogs for whatever compatibility reasons, but they do what they are designed to do: a Library is simply a virtual folder that aggregates other folders. The article's comparison is to a database view versus a table and that's an accurate analogy.

Any folder can be in a given library with one big caveat (and it is possibly the biggest that I've seen often trips casual users) so long as it is actively indexed by the Windows Search services (which is why it especially breaks the casual users that are the sort of mid-level almost power users that heard somewhere turning off Windows Search services was a "performance boost"). (Because it is Search services that provide the "view", and is the database powering the virtual folder.)

The default Libraries are based on the old school My breakdowns: My Pictures, My Documents, My Music, My Videos. But you can create your own Library of any combination of folders of interest to you.

One place it is very useful is for instance my Documents library. I can have one view that shows Documents I've got stored locally on the device only, stuff I've got in Dropbox, stuff I've in OneDrive, stuff I've got in iCloud, stuff I've got in Resilio Sync shares. It doesn't matter to me "where" I've got that particular file stored, I can search/browse the Library and access/filter/group all of the files in one place.

I can even set the default save location to whichever cloud (or otherwise) service I most trust at the moment, so if I just save a new file to my Documents library, it'll save to the Resilio Sync folder I chose this week. Last week it was a OneDrive folder, and maybe next week my needs will change again I will be back to the local-only folder. No matter which "where" it is currently pointing to, I can just select the Library in the File > Save dialog, save, and the Library will handle remembering which folder I wanted to save to this week.

OneDrive today offers the option to entirely replace the local-only Documents folder, and if that's the only provider I used that might be a good option. Libraries fit really well in this world where I have multiple providers for different needs and with different storage capabilities.

On my work computer one of those Documents folders might be a file share (so long as it is a relatively recent file server with up-to-date Offline and Search Indexing capabilities).

The same expands out to other roles like Pictures/Videos/Music. (I have multiple cloud providers for my music. I've got OneDrive and iCloud with different sets of photos. Etc.)

The idea is useful for other things. For instance, I sometimes have multiple folders for things like Git Repos, splitting them across drives due to file size for instance, and having a Repos library that shows me every Repo I'm working on no matter which drive it is physically stored on can be very useful.

You can also do some of that with NT Junction Points / Reparse Points, but that's even more extremely a Power User-only approach (and sometimes not recommended simply because of how many footguns are lying around there). Doing it as a virtual folder that's really just a Search View is all I really need in most cases.

The biggest trade-off is mostly that Libraries don't exist in the Command Line world, I can't CD to a Library in CMD. (If there were the right sort of Provider I should be able to CD to a Library directly in PowerShell, though sadly a quick search doesn't turn up an out of the box PowerShell provider for them; a shame.) But I can still open the Library in Explorer and select any subfolder in the Library and File > Open in PowerShell (Alt+F,R) it, and Explorer will do the work of figuring out which storage place it is in (its full path) for me.

chinathrow• 6 years ago

As a linux user, I really wish that the Nautilus team wouldn't have changed some UI features all in recent major version changes - it makes me wish Windows Explorer from the Win 2000 area back sometimes.

ubercow136• 6 years ago

I find Dolphin much better than Nautilus, it is probably the only traditional graphical file manager I have used that is better than Explorer. If you have a Gnome desktop set up it can be fiddly to integrate a KDE application with it nicely, but in my opinion it is worth it for Dolphin alone, one of the best engineered of the normal desktop Linux applications.

If you want to stick with GTK, Nemo is a fork of Nautilus just before all the features started being removed, which aims to stay more featureful like a traditional file manager. It's also a little bit more performant than Nautilus recently too I think, but both are still slow compared to eg. Thunar or Dolphin.

RMPR2• 6 years ago

It's also a little bit more performant than Nautilus recently too I think, but both are still slow compared to eg. Thunar or Dolphin.

Laughing in Midnight commander

p4bl0• 6 years ago

It's so weird, I can't help but feel nostalgic when I see Windows XP screenshots. It seems I really like it's aesthetic. I'm quite sure it wasn't the case at the time.

glaberficken5• 6 years ago

I always used it in "windows 2000" skin mode to save on computer resources. Can still vividly remember the day I got a new computer with enough RAM that running the Win Xp default theme didn't really make an impact.

Sharlin2• 6 years ago

Windows 95 does it for me. I still remember how advanced it looked like compared to 3.1! The XP default theme on the other hand still feels like a fairly unsuccessful and in some way infantilizing attempt at eyecandy. Around here at least it was commonly known as the ”Teletubbies” theme.

ubercow136• 6 years ago

My favourite advanced secret feature of Explorer is that you can sort files by multiple columns. First sort by the primary column such as file type, and then shift-click a secondary column such as date to add it as a second sort criteria.

glaberficken5• 6 years ago

omg... THANK YOU!

mkl4• 6 years ago

Can't you do that by sorting by the secondary column first, then the primary? I think the sort is stable, so that works.

ubercow136• 6 years ago

No, when you non-shift-click a column it seems to reset the secondary sort field to the filename regardless. And this method will make it remember the multpile sort criteria when navigating across folders and restarting Explorer, which goes further than just stable sorting.

vishnuharidas• 6 years ago

If you had fought with the Redlof virus, your 90s were awesome! Windows 98 Explorer had a feature that allowed to customize the view by adding the `Folder.htt` and `Desktop.ini` files inside a folder. The `Folder.htt` actually allowed to run VBScript inside it.

This was exploited by a virus named `VBS.Redlof.a` and spread everywhere around the world infecting all Win98 computers. If you accidentally open a folder with the Redlof files in it, it will infect the computer, make their own copies to every other folder that your visit, writes themselves into your Floppy disks, thus spreading into other computers where those floppies are used.

This article took me back to those days!

Sharlin2• 6 years ago

The author finds the My Computer/Explorer dichotomy strange, but to me the aim always felt perfectly clear. Reducing the visual clutter and mental overhead of the directory tree in the ”casual user” mode, while still providing a more powerful mode for advanced users. Windows 95 also hid file extensions, as well as hidden and system files, by default. This design direction to abstract away filesystem details has, of course, continued over the years, especially on mobile OSs—although recently even Apple, begrudgingly, has admitted that maybe the concept of ”files” is useful even on iOS, after all.

WorldMaker13• 6 years ago

It would have been more interesting a dichotomy if the "Folder view" was truly a spatial navigation system, which it seems like it wanted to be but never committed to.

It seems a shame that all OSes today seem to have given up on spatial navigation.

siggen2• 6 years ago

Replacing the menu interface with the ribbon interface in Win10 and Office... I am not sure what the thought process was for Microsoft to have done that. Sometimes you already have something solid and it doesn’t need change. I liked being able to navigate the explorer UI with the keyboard with hints provided directly in the UI. For example, Alt+T O opened the tools menu, then the Options dialog box. But now, there’s no menu....

icegreentea2• 6 years ago

I understand the frustration at having changes work against muscle memory, but you can still navigate the UI as you described - it's just that "Options" is bundled under "View" now. alt,v,y,enter or alt,v,y,o will open the options dialog. The hints are now hidden until you hit alt now though =/

siggen2• 6 years ago

Right... it’s a solution for folks who have this existing knowledge. The aim I guess is to transition folks to non-keyboard devices for navigating the UI...

AnonC2• 6 years ago

The ribbon came in MS Office 2007 as a result of user studies that showed that menus weren’t effective in showing the users what was possible or what features were available in an application. That’s why this new UI (“Fluent UI”) was designed for better discoverability. [1]

Once you do something new and different, I suppose it’s natural to copy it over everywhere else (like Windows Explorer).

[1] http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX08/UX09

dingaling• 6 years ago

It was very much an attempted solution to a self-made problem. Default toolbar config in Office programs had become so overwhelming that on a 1024x800 standard-issue corporate monitor you could literally see only a paragraph of text in the content area.

The true solution to that was probably deeper than clustering toolbar items by context. The very concept of a toolbar probably needed to be challenged.

cosmodisk• 6 years ago

I think the design that made sense stopped with Win XP. The following iterations just make less and less sense and I'm a win user since 3.1.

slantyyz• 6 years ago

For me, the pinnacle of Windows Explorer UI was Windows 2000. I am such a fan of it that for the many years I was a Mac user, I wished that there was a Finder replacement that was more like Windows Explorer.

The change in Explorer I hated the most was when they switched the '+' in the tree view to disclosure triangles.

I still use Classic Explorer [1] on every Windows computer to try and get File Explorer to look like older Explorers as much as possible.

[1] http://classicshell.net/features/#explorer

fortran77• 6 years ago

Windows 3.1 was so beautiful. Why can't we have pretty UI anymore?

oblio4• 6 years ago

To the author: stop railing about toolbars. Misguided as Microsoft is in many cases, they do have metrics for those things and people do press them. I can also add a ton of anecdotal evidence pointing that even super smart casual users don't know or use keyboard shortcuts. Even for copy paste, in many cases.

Sad from our point of view, but a lot of people have better things to do with their lives and we should stop judging them.

MayeulC2• 6 years ago

I like toolbars for quick, frequent-but-not-that-much actions, like exporting to a pdf in LibreOffice.

But I also like menu bars, as those give you some shortcuts if you often use a functionality. As an example, and since I type this into Firefox right now, after glancing at the menus, Alt+V,Y,N disables the page stylesheets, Alt+T,S synchronizes the account, etc.

omegabravo3• 6 years ago

like menubars, the toolbars give you the short cuts when you hover over them.

lqet• 6 years ago

Ha, I remember the Windows 3.11 File Manager [0], it was always anoying when you accidentally clicked on the drive A: icon and the explorer would hang for a few seconds as the drive spun up and checked whether a disk was inserted.

[0] https://gekk.info/articles/images/wfw311_explorer.png

KORraN• 6 years ago

I believe it was the case in Win98SE as well, as it was my first PC OS and I remember this issue. I was always so annoyed when I miss clicked AGAIN.

cryo2• 6 years ago

Shameless plug: I'm currently trying a new approach to file system navigation in my new visual file manager 'cryo'

https://cryonet.io

zarmin• 6 years ago

Okay I absolutely love this!

cryo2• 6 years ago

Thanks :) it's very limited yet compared to other file managers but will hopefully gain more features soon.

snarfy• 6 years ago

I remember my friend modified the win 3.1 startup shell and replaced progman.exe with winfile.exe. Program manager wasn't needed. You could run any program from file manager, and it also had File->Run... menu option.

WorldMaker13• 6 years ago

The real joy was modifying the Windows 95 startup shell on upgraded machines to progman.exe or winfile.exe and really confusing users about their "Windows 95.1"

therealmarv• 6 years ago

Since Windows 95 always better than macOS Finder (using macOS myself). Copy and Paste anyone on Mac? ;)

omegabravo3• 6 years ago

Enter to rename gets me every time.

richard_todd• 6 years ago

From 2020/retrospect it seems obvious that people would not want to switch from local files to web-pages in the same window, but it's also kind of a shame that their integrated rich-content vision didn't work out. I would rather have a unified local machine+internet experience where local and network resources are fungible, instead of "the computer is one way to run a web browser". I guess PWAs are the next chance at something better, if they can ever get things like local file access worked out and deployed.

interestica• 6 years ago

I'll add my recommendation for [OneCommander](https://mobile.twitter.com/onecommander) as a better alternative to File Explorer. it uses modified Miller Columns (like what you see in OSX/Finder) for file display. V3 alpha is hopefully out in a few weeks.

I still can't get the left sidebar in file explorer to scroll properly. Its speed of scroll is directly tied to the width of the sidebar.

waiseristy• 6 years ago

35 years of development, and it still will crash my shell the moment I right click in a slow network folder! At least MS in their infinite wisdom fixed the problem by simply restarting the shell again once it crashes! Genius!

teddyuk• 6 years ago

I love this, find it fascinating but this isn't right:

"which is historically interesting only because it shows the direction Microsoft's product lines had shifted - suddenly NT was the line where new UI developments were being made and 9x was getting hand-me-downs."

win me was the breeding ground for things that made it into win 2003, things like sfc, msconfig etc - all the utilities went into me first and then to 2003.

michalf6• 6 years ago

There’s an interesting article about ADHD on authors website: https://gekk.info/articles/adhd.html

vagrantJin• 6 years ago

Watch me save this page to blow my mind a thousand times over.

Apofis• 6 years ago

8.1 seems to have looked the nicest. The borders of explorer should have been transparent like the taskbar.

Windows Explorer Through the Years

Related Stories