Windows File Manager (WinFile) repository archived on March 1, 2025

by wolpoli • 1 year ago

64 45 1 year ago

nashashmi• 1 year ago

Quite fast. Faster than the current explorer.

lousken2• 1 year ago

they don't have the expertise? oh right, since it takes 10 seconds to load a right click context menu on the desktop in w11, no wonder /s

dboreham• 1 year ago

Only about 1s here. Wasn't the 10 second thing because it was looking for a now-absent floppy drive?

kevin_thibedeau2• 1 year ago

It depends on how many shell extensions you have installed. How something so basic can drag a supercomputer to its knees is puzzling but MS never fails to deliver.

rep_lodsb• 1 year ago

That's still billions of CPU instructions being run. If you spent the rest of your life locked in some Tibetan monastery, going through all the steps by hand on paper, you wouldn't even get 1% of the way to rendering this single context menu.

The amount of bloat in modern software is simply obscene.

babypuncher• 1 year ago

1 second is still an order of magnitude too long. Windows XP context menus were much snappier, on much weaker hardware. And XP was rather notorious for being bloated and slow at the time of its release...

Right clicks on my MacBook are perceptually instantaneous.

lousken2• 1 year ago

new w11 context menu takes "only" 5 seconds, old one 2x much, but i wouldn't call that improvement - and yea, i had some extras there, but didn't bother to troubleshoot, i was on 11 for a day before switching to linux

Yakomonaketo• 1 year ago

I think it's mostly because of the many registry entries like context shell handlers

hulitu• 1 year ago

I think it's mostly because of the many registry entries like context shell handlers

Win 11 is _slow_. 10 times slower as Win10

userbinator4• 1 year ago

Good. There wasn't much that needed changing anyway, it was nearly perfect as-is.

jug• 1 year ago

True, probably pretty feature complete after all these years although a pretty major lacking feature for any serious use is no UNC path support.

tiahura• 1 year ago

MS hate aside, Windows 11 Explorer is a thing of beauty.

7bit3• 1 year ago

The Windows 11 Explorer is also buggy as shit. They still haven't solved the issue where folders within the Download folder randomly enable grouping again. Or you know, where you could click on the address bar and see the full path to the download folder, instead you see the word Download. Great fucking Job. They butchered the W10 explorer, painted it gold, and tapped themselves on the shoulder.

SirFatty2• 1 year ago

Well, and added tabs, which is really the best part.

pests• 1 year ago

There is a setting (maybe on by default?) you just click in the location bar and it turns back into an editble text field like normal.

dole• 1 year ago

The newly hijacked right-click context menu I suspect is a new source of hangs, flickers and explorer.exe auto-restarts. Love they added a special “restart” context menu entry in Task Manager especially for it.

Windows 10 Explorer was a perfect vehicle then they had to go and throw a shitty wrap and other afternarket trash on it.

Edit: nevermind the times you have to manually hit F5 so the file you just renamed displays the new name, instead of auto-refreshing. What the sweet hell did they do?

7bit3• 1 year ago

We realize this may come as a shock and disappointment to our contributors but we simply do not have the expertise or resources within the organization to continue to maintain this project.

Resources ... Okay. What truly comes as a shock is the fact that Microsoft says they don't have expertise to continue this project. I mean, who is building Windows then? It's the same building blocks, no?!

whatever1• 1 year ago

They pretty much say that the company gutted their team to the point they cannot support the project anymore.

Given the latest layoff rounds there is also good chance that indeed they fired the people who had the expertise on this.

generalpf• 1 year ago

Who would want to work on this thing? It hasn't been a standard part of Windows for at least a decade.

jujube3• 1 year ago

I mean, who is building Windows then?

Armies of H1Bs frantically copying and pasting from Stack Overflow until something compiles.

userbinator4• 1 year ago

These days it's more likely to be AI, possibly Microsoft's own Copilot.

luckman212• 1 year ago

I (very) badly want to believe this couldn't possibly be true—but sadly, if I had to guess, I'd bet money that it is.

zifpanachr23• 1 year ago

My theory: every (I'm exaggerating, more like most) systems programmer in the company was told to join Azure or get cut. Then outsourcing or something. It's been obvious that they don't have many experienced people left to work on native windows stuff for a while now. The constant churn in the platform apis and everything getting turned into a web app was the sign.

pjmlp2• 1 year ago

You see this on the surviving team keeping up WinUI 3.0 / WinAppSDK.

It is quite obvious from whoever takes place on community calls, or that still answers on endless Github discussions, that their background isn't Windows development.

You see this by them usually not understanding what the framework is still missing from MFC, Forms, WPF, both in features, and Visual Studio tooling.

All the key figures from Windows 8 days regarding WinRT, left for Amazon, Google, or internally to Azure and AI groups.

munchler2• 1 year ago

Given the use of the singular pronoun “I” in the readme, I suspect that this was a one-person project within Microsoft, and that person is no longer available.

eek21212• 1 year ago

Win16/Win32 is going the way of the dinosaur. Many of those devs have retired or moved on.

I am personally a huge fan of win32. I was even a ReactOS contributor at one point because of this. That being said, it wasn’t scalable without major changes. Thankfully most win32 apps still work on Windows.

pjmlp2• 1 year ago

Unfortunately, that means Windows XP, as most of the new OS APIs since then are COM based, and the team keeps making it harder than it should be, as all efforts to improve its usability tend to die out after whoever championed them in first place moves into something else.

It is like Windows Development team has something against nice tooling for COM, only man with hard bear are supposed to handle it. /s

Dwedit2• 1 year ago

The control used is a ListBox, and not a ListView, because we're dealing with pre-Windows 95 software here. As a consequence, you can't use Ctrl+Arrow Keys to move the selection, and Space to toggle selection for a file. Yet you can ctrl+click files.

eek21212• 1 year ago

Thankfully, it is open source! Dig in! :D

You guys really should gift some kudos to Microsoft. As crappy as they can be, they often open source stuff.

Also, TIL that this apparently been open sourced for years.

munchler2• 1 year ago

TIL that Microsoft has been maintaining the original Windows File Manager for the last 30+ years.

kurtoid• 1 year ago

Not continuously. They revived and open-sourced it in 2018

stuaxo• 1 year ago

This was put up as a dev at MS was using it, so this was originally at least WinFile + their fixes (apologies for not going and checking who, I'm on my phone right now).

Windows File Manager (WinFile) repository archived on March 1, 2025

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