Live data from Hacker News

Files UWP: An enthusiast’s take on what Windows File Explorer explorer should be

github.com

101–110 of 187 posts

Re: Files UWP: An enthusiast’s take on what Windows File Explorer explorer should be

#101

It's funny to see the gradient in the title bar, contrasting with the bland borderless-sea-of-whiteness of the rest of the UI. > FilesUwp.Package_0.5.0.0_x64.zip 54.4 MB Nearly 55MB, compressed , for something that attempts to mimic some of the functionality of the regular explorer.exe, is quite frankly ridiculous. I don't have a system to check right now, but I believe even latest Windows 10 has an explorer.exe http…

55MB is about as large as the entire Win95 OS install.

Re: Files UWP: An enthusiast’s take on what Windows File Explorer explorer should be

#102
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just talking about 'explorer.exe' being 5 mb? You're discounting the numerous DLLs which the explorer uses, or even other shared resources which are used system-wide. And 55 MB for a native app is paltry. Even the 'Google' app on Android is 285 MB, the Gallery app of OnePlus is 70 MB.

Your standards are unfortunately warped by modern trends. Almost all popular apps are hugely bloated because the developers just don't care, the focus is on UI re-design and feature churn and the illusion of ease of development. Some counter examples (compressed installer size for convenience): 7-zip for 64-bit windows: 1.4 MiB Winamp 5.8: 7.8 MiB mpc-hc: 13.5 MiB (open source media player with many built-in codecs)…

So it’s 4x the size of mpc-hc, did the sky really fall here? I’m not on a computer but quickly scanning the repo there’s a fair number of image assets, so I don’t really know that that’s a good proxy for “bloat”

Re: Files UWP: An enthusiast’s take on what Windows File Explorer explorer should be

#104

It's funny to see the gradient in the title bar, contrasting with the bland borderless-sea-of-whiteness of the rest of the UI. > FilesUwp.Package_0.5.0.0_x64.zip 54.4 MB Nearly 55MB, compressed , for something that attempts to mimic some of the functionality of the regular explorer.exe, is quite frankly ridiculous. I don't have a system to check right now, but I believe even latest Windows 10 has an explorer.exe http…

I’m curious why it matters to you. 55MB is a trivially inexpensive amount of storage and bandwidth in 2019. It simply doesn’t make a practical difference to the vast majority of people who will use this whether it’s 55MB or 5MB.

Re: Files UWP: An enthusiast’s take on what Windows File Explorer explorer should be

#105
post #2

The only thing I've ever wanted from Explorer is... being able to see how big a directory is in the file size column.

If you open the properties of a folder, you can see how long it can take to calculate the size of a folder. This is a feature I've never really needed - what is your scenario for needing this at a glance? When I'm chasing large files that need deleting due to free space pressure I typically use something like the following https://windirstat.net/

Since Windows 98, we used Idoswin (https://www.idoswin.de/) which always calculated directory sizes in the background. It showed the sizes of directories it already calculated and made the field empty for every folder where the size was not ready yet. Usually the small directories are ready first and only the big (>1gb and many files) take a few seconds. This is done in the background and therefore doesn't disrupt your workflow at all.

Another method would be to make it midnight-commander style: add a button which will calculate & display the sizes of the directories.

So the time to calculate it is not really an issue. Use-cases are exactly cleaning up space and roughly calculating backup sizes/sizes of folders I want to copy at a single glance. You could also ask: why do we need to display the size of files in the explorer. The reasons are roughly the same.

Re: Files UWP: An enthusiast’s take on what Windows File Explorer explorer should be

#106

It's funny to see the gradient in the title bar, contrasting with the bland borderless-sea-of-whiteness of the rest of the UI. > FilesUwp.Package_0.5.0.0_x64.zip 54.4 MB Nearly 55MB, compressed , for something that attempts to mimic some of the functionality of the regular explorer.exe, is quite frankly ridiculous. I don't have a system to check right now, but I believe even latest Windows 10 has an explorer.exe http…

Just for context I packaged an empty UWP app using the release flag for x64, zipped it, and the final size came out to 23.2 MB.

Re: Files UWP: An enthusiast’s take on what Windows File Explorer explorer should be

#107

It's funny to see the gradient in the title bar, contrasting with the bland borderless-sea-of-whiteness of the rest of the UI. > FilesUwp.Package_0.5.0.0_x64.zip 54.4 MB Nearly 55MB, compressed , for something that attempts to mimic some of the functionality of the regular explorer.exe, is quite frankly ridiculous. I don't have a system to check right now, but I believe even latest Windows 10 has an explorer.exe http…

This is unnecessarily negative. I’d imagine all UWP apps are that big, and who knows how much explorer.exe functionality is in DLLs you’re not counting. The author can’t help it if modern frameworks are bloated crap.

Re: Files UWP: An enthusiast’s take on what Windows File Explorer explorer should be

#108

It's funny to see the gradient in the title bar, contrasting with the bland borderless-sea-of-whiteness of the rest of the UI. > FilesUwp.Package_0.5.0.0_x64.zip 54.4 MB Nearly 55MB, compressed , for something that attempts to mimic some of the functionality of the regular explorer.exe, is quite frankly ridiculous. I don't have a system to check right now, but I believe even latest Windows 10 has an explorer.exe http…

Storage is actually pretty cheap. Only RAM usage matters now. So 55mb is not that much of a big deal now. But this is an attempt by the author. No one is forcing you to use this. I dont know whats the point of being so negative to someone's efforts.

Re: Files UWP: An enthusiast’s take on what Windows File Explorer explorer should be

#109

It's funny to see the gradient in the title bar, contrasting with the bland borderless-sea-of-whiteness of the rest of the UI. > FilesUwp.Package_0.5.0.0_x64.zip 54.4 MB Nearly 55MB, compressed , for something that attempts to mimic some of the functionality of the regular explorer.exe, is quite frankly ridiculous. I don't have a system to check right now, but I believe even latest Windows 10 has an explorer.exe http…

The author is a student, so I think we can give them a pass. Besides, the code gets compiled! It's hardly as if that if statement is contributing to bulking out the executable to 55MB.

UWP apps tend to be pretty big, especially when compared to Win32/whatever Explorer is written in. That has very little to do with the author and much to do with the framework.

It's a little dispiriting to see this as the top HN comment on a high schooler's project .

Re: Files UWP: An enthusiast’s take on what Windows File Explorer explorer should be

#110

It's funny to see the gradient in the title bar, contrasting with the bland borderless-sea-of-whiteness of the rest of the UI. > FilesUwp.Package_0.5.0.0_x64.zip 54.4 MB Nearly 55MB, compressed , for something that attempts to mimic some of the functionality of the regular explorer.exe, is quite frankly ridiculous. I don't have a system to check right now, but I believe even latest Windows 10 has an explorer.exe http…

55MB sounds OK to me. At least it is much smaller than typical Electron apps. And the piece of code you show is completely unrelated to your point.
Post reply on HN