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Windows Explorer Through the Years

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Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#81

Post by vishnuharidas »

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!

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#82

Post by bserge »

vbezhenar wrote: post #4

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.

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

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#83

Post by Sharlin »

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.

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#84

Post by badsectoracula »

toyg wrote: post #69
Jaruzel wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right move IMHO, I always found it a bit confusing and somewhat arbitrary. However, removing MDI from Office apps was not followed by implementing a persistent-background-app replacement. So now you open a Word document, wait with splash-screen, look at the document, close it, then open another Word document, wait with splash-screen , repeat... so annoying.

I do not see how it is confusing (to someone who is familiar with computers - i can see how some people who aren't used to computers might be confused by the maximization state).

It is very useful in several types of applications, like image editors where you want to have multiple images open while having docked toolbars/controls, avoiding a waste of screen space and a clean background. This way you can have, e.g. the same image visible in two views or you can have an image that you pick colors from to paint or you can have several tileable images as "materials" to quickly a brush with the clone tool, etc. Personally i always found the UI of Paint Shop Pro 7 the best image editor UI and its MDI-based interface is a big reason for that (though not the only reason).

In fact i find MDI so useful that i recently implemented it in Lazarus' LCL backend for Win32 - the next version of Lazarus is going to be the first one to support MDI under Windows. The reason is that i want to use it in a game engine editor i'm working on to open different resource types inside their own windows that often do not warrant using a fullscreen window (e.g. a list editor).

And actually the two main annoyances i have with the most common "solution" (a work around really) of using tabs is that very often most of the content space in a tab is wasted since there isn't really a reason to have it cover the entire main window while at the same time you can only have one view visible at any time (no side by side or anything like that). In theory you can split the tabs in different groups but again you are forcing the views to adhere to the main window - and in practice the only application i've seen doing that is Visual Studio (which also has an in-editor split functionality and the number of times i needed either was much less than the number of times i needed to have documents/views visible side by side in other types of applications).

Honestly i think Microsoft did a mistake for abandoning MDI just because some people weren't able to use it back in the 90s. Windows has a ton more stuff that can be confusing to a newbie but they aren't getting removed because they are useful.

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#85

Post by badsectoracula »

open-source-ux wrote: post #10

"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 Mi…

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.

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#86

Post by galacticdessert »

glaberficken wrote: post #68
axegon_ wrote: post #25

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.

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.

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

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#87

Post by jooize »

toyg wrote: post #44
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

equivalent on Mac: Alt + Right Click.

Windows requires the modifier key held down when clicking, but macOS adjusts the open menu according with currently held down modifiers.

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#88

Post by RMPR »

ubercow13 wrote: post #74
chinathrow wrote: post #53

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.

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…

>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

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#89

Post by toyg »

jooize wrote: post #87
toyg wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

equivalent on Mac: Alt + Right Click.

Windows requires the modifier key held down when clicking, but macOS adjusts the open menu according with currently held down modifiers.

True, and definitely something Windows should have.

Re: Windows Explorer Through the Years

#90

Post by Jaruzel »

vinw wrote: post #64
Jaruzel wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FYI: deprecate [0] [0] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/deprecate

FYI: depreciated [0] :)

[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/deprecia...

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