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.
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.
Starting in Windows 8 :<p>> <i>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><p>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).
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.<p>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"...).
I wish Windows Save/Open dialogues would have links to already open Explorer windows (much like the links to Documents.)<p>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.
Related and kind of interesting, the original File Manager was open sourced and recompiled for modern Windows.<p><a href="https://github.com/microsoft/winfile" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/microsoft/winfile</a>
<i>"Windows 98 was famously controversial, at least in nerd circles, for the integration of Internet Explorer into Explorer itself"</i><p>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.<p>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:<p><a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/appuistart/inductive-user-interface" rel="nofollow">https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/appuistart/in...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>This article took me back to those days!
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.
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).<p>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.<p>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 <i>new to computers</i> as well as power users.<p>> 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. <i>Many users were also confused by the Parent Folder icon.</i> It appeared in every folder and looked like a file, yet was really a navigation control for moving up the hierarchy one level.<p>[1] <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/238386.238611" rel="nofollow">https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/238386.238611</a><p>Edit:<p>> [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.<p>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 <i>more</i> functionality into the Title Bar these days.
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, <i>especially</i> on mobile OSs—although recently even Apple, begrudgingly, has admitted that maybe the concept of ”files” is useful even on iOS, after all.
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.<p>I want a massive checkbox that says "Never, <i>EVER</i>, try to automatically determine the best viewing mode. Really. Never!"
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.<p>[0] <a href="https://gekk.info/articles/images/wfw311_explorer.png" rel="nofollow">https://gekk.info/articles/images/wfw311_explorer.png</a>
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.<p>Actually respecting the user's settings is something modern Microsoft doesn't view as important anymore.
Shameless plug: I'm currently trying a new approach to file system navigation in my new visual file manager 'cryo'<p><a href="https://cryonet.io" rel="nofollow">https://cryonet.io</a>
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>There is also a simpler way to write Shell extensions using a C# wrapper if that works for your use case [3].<p>[1]: <a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/shell-exts" rel="nofollow">https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/shell-e...</a>
[2]: <a href="https://filemark.app/" rel="nofollow">https://filemark.app/</a>
[3]: <a href="https://github.com/dwmkerr/sharpshell" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dwmkerr/sharpshell</a>
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....
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.<p>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.
I love this, find it fascinating but this isn't right:<p>"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."<p>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.
I'll add my recommendation for [OneCommander](<a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/onecommander" rel="nofollow">https://mobile.twitter.com/onecommander</a>) 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.<p>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.
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.
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!
For document tabs, file tags, notes, and so on, can I recommend my DocxManager (<a href="https://docxmanager.com" rel="nofollow">https://docxmanager.com</a>) for "File Manager for Word documents"?
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.
There’s an interesting article about ADHD on authors website: <a href="https://gekk.info/articles/adhd.html" rel="nofollow">https://gekk.info/articles/adhd.html</a>
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.