Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for?

You could refresh any folder in Explorer, not just your desktop. It&#x27;s not just about Active Desktop &#x27;michaelt mentioned (which had a refresh, but I guess it was a <i>different</i> refresh, coming from IE and not explorer.exe), but - as &#x27;UnoriginalGuy hinted - because Explorer could, and often did, go out of sync for various reasons. It didn&#x27;t affect only networked drives, it happened equally well when you had enough many files in a folder (something must have been timing out) or your computer was overloaded. The most common case I recall - Explorer didn&#x27;t automatically show files created by other programs, sometimes it didn&#x27;t even show a folder or a file you created via context menu.<p>Actually, I&#x27;m pretty sure some of this still happens today, in particular I remember noticing on Vista&#x2F;Win7 that Explorer sometimes doesn&#x27;t immediately refresh the folder contents when there&#x27;s a new file created by external application (e.g. a log file), and refresh&#x2F;F5 is useful to get this file visible immediately.<p>Funny thing, per the phenomenon of operant conditioning, over the years of using Windows I learned to regularly refresh Explorer windows via F5 to ensure I always see what&#x27;s really there, sometimes just for my own peace of mind.

It is possible, although rare, for Windows Explorer to get out of sync with what exists on the file system or virtual filesystem(s). The refresh button re-acquires the data from the source and re-draws the result for the user.<p>For example, if you open a network share, delete a file using another machine that file might take between several seconds to a minute to disappear visually (although if you try to use the file you&#x27;ll get an error and it will refresh removing it). You can alternatively use the refresh button to get an updated view instantly.<p>It is mostly useful with non-standard virtual file system services rather than the normal NTFS&#x2F;FAT32 file systems Windows uses.

Back in Windows 98 there was a feature called &#x27;Active Desktop&#x27; that could use web pages as desktop wallpaper (or partial desktop wallpaper). It was intended to be an early version of desktop widgets like stock tickers. As these were basically web pages, you could refresh for the same reasons you might refresh in a web browser.<p>As you could execute javascript it was also possible to do things like change your desktop wallpaper when you resized or rotated your screen. But active desktop was never heavily used enough to have all the bugs in it sorted out - if you widget&#x27;s javascript tried to display a message box you could trigger a crash, for example.<p>I assume that feature is gone now - but presumably you can still put files on the desktop, so presumably there&#x27;s a refresh button in case you have some strange configuration like your desktop folder mounted from a network share.

Like other people said, it is about refreshing the view for changes that didn&#x27;t trigger an automatic refresh.<p>If you dig the details, behind the scenes an API called ReadDirectoryChangesW is called, which uses a notification-like system to report changes within a directory. However, that API is weird, so various types of changes are not correctly reported and explorer.exe is stuck with outdated data. The refresh forces it to update the view.<p>Disclaimer: I&#x27;ve had to use that API recently to code a simple python file monitor in Windows. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gusmd&#x2F;vigil.py" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gusmd&#x2F;vigil.py</a> in case anyone is interested.

To add to the comments about file listings not refreshing, note that the desktop is just a fancy-looking Explorer file listing widget (&quot;control&quot; in Windows-speak).

I&#x27;ll add, &quot;behaviour of Windows regarding floppy disk drives&quot;.

Could be relevant for users on network connections which don&#x27;t update state? But on the desktop explicitly, certainly seems odd.

If you ever work on two computers over a shared network drive with Macs working in the exact same folder you&#x27;ll immediately know the answer to this question ;) I don&#x27;t understand why every system doesn&#x27;t have one.

I use it when I do a Subversion update. TortoiseSVN puts a red icon on non-current folders and a green icon on up-to-date folders. Sometimes the icon doesn&#x27;t change color when you update though, so you have to refresh.

I wish Tortoise&#x2F;SVN responded to F5&#x2F;Refresh :o(

it&#x27;s there to force-render any changes made on the user-interface (explorer.exe, desktop) that aren&#x27;t rendered properly.

It&#x27;s basically a workaround for a feature that never worked properly on windows: filesystem events in fs viewer apps.

To keep the non-technophiles occupied while they wait for their external device to be detected, and to soothe them by giving them something to do (repeatedly) to &quot;speed up&quot; their ageing computer.

In the past when CRT monitors were in usage,the ui needs to be painted on the screen.The crt technology refreshes screen so that pixels can work properly.If they are not refreshed,then some pixels become &#x27;dead&#x27;.