Windows File Manager (WinFile) repository archived on March 1, 2025

31•wolpoli•3h ago

Comments

nashashmi•3h ago

Quite fast. Faster than the current explorer.

lousken•3h ago

they don't have the expertise? oh right, since it takes 10 seconds to load a right click context menu on the desktop in w11, no wonder /s

dboreham•2h ago

Only about 1s here. Wasn't the 10 second thing because it was looking for a now-absent floppy drive?

kevin_thibedeau•2h ago

It depends on how many shell extensions you have installed. How something so basic can drag a supercomputer to its knees is puzzling but MS never fails to deliver.

lifeisgood99•2h ago

The simplest explanation would be that those shell extensions have poor performance.

userbinator•19m ago

That's total BS, unless it's MS' own code in those extensions. Very typical of them to blame others when it's their own shit code that's causing the problem.

As the other comment here notes, shell extensions have been around for a long time, and have never been a problem on older versions of Windows running on hardware that's much slower than what's available today.

kmeisthax•2h ago

One wonders if it would be possible to invoke those extensions asynchronously and put a little "loading" icon where any new shell items might appear. Or have a hard 2s timeout after which any latecomers get shoved behind another layer of menus.

kevin_thibedeau•2h ago

They'd probably implement that by launching a new Electron process to keep up with the times.

saratogacx•1h ago

If you turn off animations they ARE loading the menu asynchronously. You'll see a basic menu with the extensions added on as the menu continues to grow and reflow. It's worse if you right click on a file. It also DOES use "loading" placeholder text

(e) added the bit about the loading text.

immibis•2h ago

Its a disease all over software engineering. We add just enough layers of abstraction, but no more, to make it about ten times slower than a Commodore 64. The excuse is that it's to avoid having to think end-to-end as one human can't possibly think end-to-end these days. The reality is the reason they can't is because of all these useless indirection layers in the middle and if those were deleted, they could.

rep_lodsb•1h ago

That's still billions of CPU instructions being run. If you spent the rest of your life locked in some Tibetan monastery, going through all the steps by hand on paper, you wouldn't even get 1% of the way to rendering this single context menu.

The amount of bloat in modern software is simply obscene.

babypuncher•1h ago

1 second is still an order of magnitude too long. Windows XP context menus were much snappier, on much weaker hardware. And XP was rather notorious for being bloated and slow at the time of its release...

Right clicks on my MacBook are perceptually instantaneous.

petahpintah•46m ago

Please be joking...

Yakomonaketo•1h ago

I think it's mostly because of the many registry entries like context shell handlers

userbinator•2h ago

Good. There wasn't much that needed changing anyway, it was nearly perfect as-is.

jug•2h ago

True, probably pretty feature complete after all these years although a pretty major lacking feature for any serious use is no UNC path support.

tiahura•2h ago

MS hate aside, Windows 11 Explorer is a thing of beauty.

7bit•2h ago

The Windows 11 Explorer is also buggy as shit. They still haven't solved the issue where folders within the Download folder randomly enable grouping again. Or you know, where you could click on the address bar and see the full path to the download folder, instead you see the word Download. Great fucking Job. They butchered the W10 explorer, painted it gold, and tapped themselves on the shoulder.

SirFatty•2h ago

Well, and added tabs, which is really the best part.

Lammy•1h ago

I have that on Windows 10 for all applications instead of just Explorer: https://www.stardock.com/products/groupy/

userbinator•1h ago

Hell no. There's already a taskbar --- although that's another thing they've managed to screw up in Win11.

pests•1h ago

There is a setting (maybe on by default?) you just click in the location bar and it turns back into an editble text field like normal.

7bit•2h ago

> We realize this may come as a shock and disappointment to our contributors but we simply do not have the expertise or resources within the organization to continue to maintain this project.

Resources ... Okay. What truly comes as a shock is the fact that Microsoft says they don't have expertise to continue this project. I mean, who is building Windows then? It's the same building blocks, no?!

whatever1•2h ago

They pretty much say that the company gutted their team to the point they cannot support the project anymore.

Given the latest layoff rounds there is also good chance that indeed they fired the people who had the expertise on this.

generalpf•1h ago

Who would want to work on this thing? It hasn't been a standard part of Windows for at least a decade.

jujube3•1h ago

> I mean, who is building Windows then?

Armies of H1Bs frantically copying and pasting from Stack Overflow until something compiles.

userbinator•1h ago

These days it's more likely to be AI, possibly Microsoft's own Copilot.

zifpanachr23•52m ago

My theory: every (I'm exaggerating, more like most) systems programmer in the company was told to join Azure or get cut. Then outsourcing or something. It's been obvious that they don't have many experienced people left to work on native windows stuff for a while now. The constant churn in the platform apis and everything getting turned into a web app was the sign.

munchler•6m ago

Given the use of the singular pronoun “I” in the readme, I suspect that this was a one-person project within Microsoft, and that person is no longer available.

Dwedit•1h ago

The control used is a ListBox, and not a ListView, because we're dealing with pre-Windows 95 software here. As a consequence, you can't use Ctrl+Arrow Keys to move the selection, and Space to toggle selection for a file. Yet you can ctrl+click files.

munchler•10m ago

TIL that Microsoft has been maintaining the original Windows File Manager for the last 30+ years.

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