RSSTop 10 Windows 7 Features #4: A worthwhile Windows Explorer
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published May 19, 2009, 6:08 PM
Over the last few decades of Windows' existence, Microsoft has wrestled with the problem of how much control it should give users over the arrangement and organization of files on their computers. In a perfect world, users shouldn't have to care about their \Windows\System32 or \Windows\SysWOW64 directories, so a good file manager shouldn't make the mistake of exposing users to information they don't know how to deal with. On the other hand, knowledgeable users will need to have access to system directories in such a way that they don't have to jump through hoops to find them.
It is a balancing act, but not an impossible one. Over the years, third-party file management utilities such as Total Commander and xPlorer2 have been among the most popular software downloaded through Betanews Fileforum. Granted, these are typically installed and used by folks who know such bits of trivia as the fact that the \Application Data\Local Settings\Microsoft\Office folder in Windows XP maps to the \AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office folder in Windows Vista. But the reason they're popular with folks such as myself is because we need more direct and comprehensive access to the systems we manage. What's more, we commonly need access to two directories at once, and it makes more visual sense to have them both open.
Almost dual-pane While the updated Windows Explorer in Windows 7 is not in itself a dual-pane file manager, the surprise is that it does not need to be. With the company's designers having implemented a snap-to feature called Aero Snap -- born out of the company's more intensive experiments with multitouch -- two open Explorer windows can very rapidly become as functional as a side-by-side, dual-pane file manager.
You open the first pane the usual way -- for instance, by selecting Computer from the Start Menu. Then drag that new window by its title bar over to the left side. (By the way, contrary to what we've been told and what we've read, the behavior we're actually seeing in Win7 is that you cannot drag a window by its title bar past the screen border.) By default now, there is a folder tree along the left side of each pane; you don't have to pull it up manually as you did with XP, and you don't have to pull up folders from a hidden frame as you sometimes did with Vista. So you open up a second Explorer window by right-clicking on the destination directory in the folder list, and from the popup, selecting Open in new window. Drag that to the right and release, and the second pane semi-maximizes to fill the space.
Libraries For most production environments, business documents have a variety of home locations. Though you might think it's nice to have a "My Documents" directory, a single locale for wrapping all manners of media together in one tidy folder, when you manage any kind of enterprise whose business is the production of content, in practice, it becomes tenuous at best, untenable at worst. What's more, the business has its own documents, you have your own personal documents…and then you have your very personal documents. Relying on the Windows file system to keep those locales appropriately segregated and yet associated with one another, is not a productive use of one's time.
Windows 7 (and Windows Server 2008 R2) address this dilemma in a new and, at least from my point of view, hopeful way, through the use of libraries. We introduced you to libraries in our article on Homegroup networking. Essentially, a library is an aggregate collection of all the subfolders belonging to a set of one or more member folders. So you can collect documents (not videos, not pictures, not CD images, but the stuff you can print) together from multiple locations throughout your network or your Homegroup, in a centralized repository called Documents. That way, you can go ahead and keep those documents stored in multiple locations as necessary; the library collects their subfolders together into a single view without coalescing them into a single folder or locale.
While this changes things for Explorer, it can make things confusing for other programs, especially with regard to saving files. If you'll recall, Windows Explorer also provides the Open, Save, and Save As dialog boxes for applications such as Word and Excel. There are two ways of viewing libraries with respect to other folders, and their differences are esoteric but important: By default, Libraries are stationed along the left pane in a batch by themselves (in these screenshots, you'll see a library I've created called "Mixed Media," which is not one of Windows 7's default libraries). There, Documents looks like a subfolder marked with a piece-of-paper icon, but it isn't one -- it's just a member library. Now, the alternate view mode is accessible from the Tools menu (when you have the menu bar showing); from the Folder Options dialog box, under Navigation pane, it's called Show all folders. While that expands the number of folders you see in the entire list, it also scoots the Libraries group to make it look like a subfolder of Desktop. That doesn't quite make sense to me yet, but maybe I'll adapt.
Anyway, when you "Save As," in Office 2007 by default, you're still pointed to your default personal documents directory, which in Windows 7 is now called, once again, My Documents (a phrase brought back from the XP days). This is because you need to be able to save files to explicit locations. When you open a file, however, Office 2007 SP2 knows to look at the Documents library first, which makes this aggregation both convenient and smart. Again, how you see the libraries listed in Explorer depends on whether you have Show all folders checked or unchecked.
The existence of libraries in Windows 7 creates another benefit for keeping one's personal documents and media on separate drives or network locations from your operating system: Should you do a clean and fresh install of Win7, as many will choose to do for perfectly good reasons (we've had some talks about this in the Comments section in recent days), it only takes a few moments to re-enroll your media and other files in Win7 libraries, rather than having to restore them from backups.
Next: Catching up with your cell phone's view of media…
and still no way to add a folder-size column like we use to do with foldersize on XP. Why can't microsoft come up with a feature or a simple way to implement one (they already did in XP they just removed it on vista) when apple has ...
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|cool that it auto enlarges to make best use of space. I'd like that as an optional thing on os x(focus on optional, like hold a button to make it happen) but the things still dog ugly.
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|I *hate* dual-pane. Always have, always will.
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|So does can automatically add transfers to a queue now - like say Xtree Gold or any FTP app - or does it still try to do it all at once - and fail?
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|So now when I browse in filezilla:
\username\documents\my pictures
\username\pictures
\username\documents\
\username\my documents
all show up.
But in Explorer, I only see
\username\my documents and
\username\my pictures?
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|With XP Favorites I could group my shortcut links to the file system in nested folders. With Vista and Win7 this is gone... which makes for extra scrolling... and no-grouping.
I have groups by projects with links that can be local and network all in a folder. I sure miss this. I could also switch between my favorites (logical) folder view and explorer (physical) folder view with the click of related icon on the toolbar... was very nice.
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|Drag the folder to the favorites section in the explorer window.
No nesting though, near as I can tell...at least as I expect you'd want it.
Or:
Right click on folder - "Include in Library" - "Create new Library"
:)
Places them near the top of the tree, nested... Hope that helps.
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|Look at this video to see what I mean: http://tinyurl.com/MyWin7Wish
and this image: http://tinyurl.com/MyWin7WishImage
Libraries will not show shortcuts in the treeview.
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|I have a problem with the Snap to feature, I have two monitors and i only apear to bea able to snap to the outer edges so i can't easily arrange 2 explorer windows on one monitor, does anybody know if this is by design or if it's a bug and how i can report it to microsoft?
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|Had the same issue:
WIN+LEFT (or RIGHT) still works. Just use the key-combos. I know the 3rd party "AeroSnap" program for XP/Vista has the same issue.
Win+Left=Maximize to left side of the screen.
Win+Right=Maximize to right side of the screen.
Win+Up=Maximize
Win+Down=Minimize
Win+s***+Up=Maximize to length of screen (Up and down, not side-to-side)
hope that helps.
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|Also Win+left+Left or Win Right+Right will continually pin the active window across your multimonitor setup.
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|Thankyou, this is brilliant
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|"Over the last few decades of Windows' existence, Microsoft has wrestled with the problem of how much control it should give users over the arrangement and organization of files on their computers. In a perfect world, users shouldn't have to care about their \Windows\System32 or \Windows\SysWOW64 directories, so a good file manager shouldn't make the mistake of exposing users to information they don't know how to deal with. On the other hand, knowledgeable users will need to have access to system directories in such a way that they don't have to jump through hoops to find them."
This points to the entire problem with Windows lately - Microsoft is dumbing down Windows in hopes of gaining a greater audience. The problem is, the dummies don't use the Explorer interface anyway - they are either uninterested or too ignorant, so why worry about them. Microsoft has had bugs in the bowels of Explorer since he days of Windows 3.0 (sorry, I never used Windows before that, I used DesqView). Anyway, the problem remains when doing heavy duty file management, like moving many files across drives, and renaming some of them - the Explorer will crash (it does not matter the system, or the memory available at first - more memory merely staves off the problem). Since all third party file managers hook into these same bowels, they also will crash, however, some are less prone to crash than the Windows FM, so I'm thinking it must have something to do with allocation of free memory. Long story short - unless this is fixed in Windows 7, what's the point?
I hate to sound like an old curmudgeon, but there has never been a file manager as easy or useful as XTree Pro for DOS. The Windows version was seriously flawed, because it did not block the keystrokes used by Microsoft, and allow the key sequences already established, along with all the other DOS defaults, but it still used the same ideas - I have yet to find any other that has that usability, though xplorer² comes close.
This is all a part of the larger problem, if you continue to dumb down Windows, and try to make it idiot proof, only idiots will want to use it ( and they come up with better idiots all the time).
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|"when doing heavy duty file management, like moving many files across drives, and renaming some of them - the Explorer will crash (it does not matter the system, or the memory available at first - more memory merely staves off the problem)."
It will?
Every time?
No...it won't. In fact, I can honestly say I've *never* seen Windows Explorer crash from "heavy duty" usage. Somehow our servers manage to stay up when copying entire drives from one to another. Somehow my system remains stable while copying my 1TB video folder from one PC to another.
XTree...wow. Nice trip through the wayback machine. I haven't heard of that bit o' gold in ages.
"This is all a part of the larger problem, if you continue to dumb down Windows, and try to make it idiot proof, only idiots will want to use it ( and they come up with better idiots all the time)."
Unfortunately, MSFT (and Canonical...and Apple) see it differently. It is their understanding (through marketing research, consumer watch groups, metrics, etc) that the majority of computer users don't know a CPU from a case or a File Browser from a Web Browser. This is the type of person they are building the OS for. Those rare folks like those that might visit BN, Ars, or even slashdot (and rare they are in the big picture) have 3rd party tools to satisfy their power-user needs.
...and really, it's probably for the best. You and I liked XTree, the guy in the office next to me swears by the old "Norton Commander". You have Directory Opus fans, Total commander fans.. There's no *way* MSFT or anyone else could make *one* file manager *all* of the power users would like (and that normal users would actually be able to use...).
So they build for the lowest common denominator. Should this surprise anyone? It's the same in any industry that isn't catering to a niche crowd.
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|Perhaps you don't move and rename enough files. I had this same problem trying to convince Ed Bott (ZDNet). I can do it on many different machines, over every version of Windows, up to 7. No I cannot predict it, but like an earthquake it happens.
This happens on machines that are otherwise factory fresh (various Dells over the years), built by me(both Intel and AMD, with various states of additional software), and while working on other people's machines.
If you work on a machine long enough, without rebooting, and move and rename enough files, it will happen - it got much more difficult to do with XP over any 9x version, but it's still there. I've had other techs tell me they knew of the problem, yet they can't point to a specific circumstance to force it to happen in a certain measured time frame. (One even named it "Ghosts in the Machine")
On the machines I have built and used, I have verified that it is not a patch level error, as each machine was fully patched, or a memory error (that is, caused by the physical RAM), as I've caused it to happen on a machine that had successfully run Prime 95 for a week (trying to prove a point to someone else about the fact it was not flakey memory).
As to the file manager, what I should have stated, is that the idiots don't even look at the file manager, they either use the My Computer icon, or are the totally oblivious type, thinking that the machine will magically do the work for them. So - the point becomes, why not give the users who know what to do with it a usable, and competitve file manager?
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|"As to the file manager, what I should have stated, is that the idiots don't even look at the file manager, they either use the My Computer icon, or are the totally oblivious type, thinking that the machine will magically do the work for them. So - the point becomes, why not give the users who know what to do with it a usable, and competitve file manager?"
Both "My Computer" and "Explorer" are the same program (Pretty sure you know that, but the way you worded that made me wonder).
Okay...
Again, it's a "who are they designing the OS for?" question. Sure, they could code in more competitive functionality, but when only 1% of the user-base will ever access it *and* that 1% will strongly and vocally disagree with how it was implemented or even what functionality should be added, it becomes more a question of "What can we *remove* to avoid that?". :)
I'm not saying I "like" the Explorer in Windows (I switch between Opus and Explorer frequently), I am just stating my guess as to what their reasoning is behind the decisions they have made regarding it.
..and frankly, I agree with them. Sure, I'd like to have *my* favorite features coded into the thing, but they'll be useless to most everyone else...so why muck it up? A basic file browser is good enough for most. The rest can use their favorite 3rd party apps.
Besides, if they did, we'd hear no end of whining about how you can't uninstall the Windows File Manager.... :p
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|"I hate to sound like an old curmudgeon, but there has never been a file manager as easy or useful as XTree Pro for DOS. The Windows version was seriously flawed, because it did not block the keystrokes used by Microsoft, and allow the key sequences already established, along with all the other DOS defaults, but it still used the same ideas - I have yet to find any other that has that usability, though xplorer² comes close."
Stop looking, it's been here for years: http://www.ztree.com/ :-)
100% compatible with XTree keystrokes and UI paradigm, but Unicode aware, with macros, incredible history recall, Application menu with many tokens. Lightning fast console 32-bit app, split screen, branch view, global view (ALL disks in a flat few, for example).
There is a large following of power users (others, don't bother): http://www.ztw3.com/forum/forum.php
Most have 15-20 years of admin and similar experience. I use ZTreeWin exclusively for everything.
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|"the dummies don't use the Explorer interface anyway"
That's where I stopped reading.
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|"Anyway, when you "Save As," in Office 2007 by default, you're still pointed to your default personal documents directory, which in Windows 7 is now called, once again, My Documents (a phrase brought back from the XP days). "
Serious? Poor users. I really feel for them. Let me guess, MSFT will rename the default profile directory back to c:\winnt\profiles as well?
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|Haven't really had any of the issues below...but I;ve got everything set to details view, anyway.
I did need to do a little research to find out how to get the folders to automatically expand (annoyed the hell out of me that they didn't), but other than that, meh.. It's a file browser. If I wanted a file manager, I'd go with Directory Opus or some such.
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|I've been cursing about Windows Explorer in Vista for over a year now and still haven't stopped cursing yet... It literally has a mind of it's own! Visit the same directory several times in a session or two and the view automatically changes periodically, which is the most insane and annoying thing ever for a file manager to do. Or visit different directories and it will select whatever view it feels is best.. I love it when I visit a directory full of text files and Vista's explorer picks Large Icon view, and then I immediately visit a directory full of images and it picks either small icon or details view instead.
I agree with sumone, the explorer in XP was just about right, it had just about the right balance needed.
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|Are you freaking kidding? XP's Explorer was the best they had and they ruined it completely in Vista/Windows 7. In Windows 7, it's a little more tolerable but still a joke. Look how many things they removed in Vista (http://en.wikipedia.org/..._Vista#Windows_Explorer) and in Windows 7 (http://en.wikipedia.org/...dows_7#Windows_Explorer). Windows Explorer/Shell is the worst piece of crap s*** in the whole OS now. The Open/Save common dialogs are also buggy, slow and unproductive as hell as the common locations are never in the same place and require scrolling. Why the hell does the desktop not appear in the breadcrumbs bar?
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|Its crap. Its difficult to differentiate between levels of folders because the folders are not spaced enough. Compare this to XP's explorer. Also, does it show you which profile is currently in use as XP did? This was useful for troubleshooters.
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|"you don't have to pull it up manually as you did with XP"
Pedant mode on:
If you clicked "My Computer" you did. If you use the Windows Key+E shortcut it's automatic.
"It will then store album art thumbnails as hidden JPEG files alongside your MP3s in their native directories."
Bah. I like the album art stored as part of the ID3 tag. Sure, it duplicated the amont of space used by the picture, but it means files can be serperated from each folder and still retain their cover art.
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|My rants?
1. How can this be: Windows Explorer cannot display the total size of more than 15 files selected and you have to push the link in the bottom "Show more details..."??!!
2. Why I can use Alt+Enter to show the properties of a folder in the right side of the window and in the tree view not?
3. Why if I navigate in the tree with the keyboard, the right side is not refreshed for every folder?
4. Why it takes so long to overwrite a large group of files? Not the operation itself but for the dialogue to appear, it takes quite a time.
5. Where is that simple and so useful info about the free space left on the drive?
And yes, I submitted these to Microsoft since the first beta.
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