Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

i guess they did see this kind of constant change working out well for apple so started copying that.
but they neither have the flair, nor invest the time and thought into designing and polishing nor do they have the fanatical userbase to put up with it all.

commodorejohn wrote: Unfortunately true. Windows Explorer was never anything amazing, but it used to be a fairly solid, dependable file manager/graphical shell for those of us who didn't need anything fancy. Unfortunately, Microsoft has been trying to progressively dumb it down and turn it into a glorified media-library browser for years now, and ever since Vista they've taken away more and more of the options for getting it back to its sensible old self. Worst of all, they've started changing shit that breaks existing workflows; that's been the last straw that got me to suck it up and have another go at acclimating to Linux after three years of leaving it the hell alone.

They've also been very good at introducing annoying bugs then refusing to fix them too. In Windows 7 there's the annoying "folder jumping" bug whereby every time you open a sub folder in the tree view, it scrolls upwards to hide all the contents, so you have to manually scroll down, then open the next folder, it jumps upwards again, etc. When pressed MS said "yeah that's by design", which has to be one of the stupidest excuses not to fix a bug that I've ever seen.

Thankfully Classic Shell fixes it and restores other functionality that MS removed in their infinite wisdom...

Is classic shell a separate install or a mode of the existing windows explorer? I only use windows at work, where I have no administrative privilege and thus, at the risk of being obvious, cannot install anything...

I don't know the low-level details, but it's some kind of patch you install. It definitely helps bring Win8 closer to being usable, but unfortunately they've fucked up too much else for me. (For starters, even Classic Shell doesn't fix the irritating thing where minimizing a window no longer sends it to the back of the Alt-Tab list, which is hella irritating.)

vishnu wrote: Is classic shell a separate install or a mode of the existing windows explorer?

It's a separate (third-party) install. http://www.classicshell.net/

jpstewart wrote:

vishnu wrote: Is classic shell a separate install or a mode of the existing windows explorer?

It's a separate (third-party) install. http://www.classicshell.net/

I've been using ClassicShell for the last five years. Works great on everything from Vista (NT 6.0) to Windows 8.1 (NT 6.3), including the server releases. Still baffled by the "flat" look in Win8/Win2012R2. The border is too thick, but there's a registry setting that can fix that. I am curious to see what MS does to Win10's start menu, now that they've come to their senses (somewhat) and added it back. Though, I suspect I'll find something annoying about it and just install an updated ClassicShell to cover it up.

vishnu wrote: Windows Explorer is a great file manager but really there's no functionality it has, even in Windows 8, that you can't get from a host of Linux or Unix filemanagers, or for that matter even from the 10-years-since-it's-been-updated TkDesk for graciousness sake... :|

Hmm, I'll have to play with TkDesk some. I've been designing a small app in Python/Tkinter and while it looks great in Windows, it looks like crap on Linux. I've been pondering trying to use the Motif theme across both Windows and Linux for consistency (and a homage to old school UNIX), but never found solid code examples for this. I think TkDesk might just offer that. Have to brush up on my Tcl, though...

Also, the ability to use regular expressions in filename searches is something Explorer has never had. I don't know why the hell MS keeps trying to force Windows Search down their user's throats. Popping open a cmd.exe shell and running "dir <file mask> /s" works 10x faster than Search ever has, especially on mapped network drives located halfway across the country.

Kumba wrote: I've been using ClassicShell for the last five years. Works great on everything from Vista (NT 6.0) to Windows 8.1 (NT 6.3), including the server releases. Still baffled by the "flat" look in Win8/Win2012R2. The border is too thick, but there's a registry setting that can fix that. I am curious to see what MS does to Win10's start menu, now that they've come to their senses (somewhat) and added it back. Though, I suspect I'll find something annoying about it and just install an updated ClassicShell to cover it up.

I've used it since Windows 7 came along (didn't use Vista, outside of an initial bit of trialling before jumping back to XP). I keep the standard Windows 7 start menu, but do use classic shell to fix the folder jumping, add back the "shared" icon overlay to folders, restore the "disk space free" entry to the status bar, etc. It's nice and also very flexible, and the amount of options it has also shows you just how much useful stuff MS removed for some stupid reason or other.

Doubt it'd work on a machine with no admin rights though unfortunately, although if you try hard enough, there's almost always a way around that .