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Microsoft Open-Sources Original File Manager From the 1990s So It Can Run On Windows 10 (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Microsoft is releasing the source code for its original Windows File Manager from nearly 28 years ago. Originally released for Windows 3.0, the File Manager was a replacement for managing files through MS-DOS, and allowed Windows users to copy, move, delete, and search for files. While it's a relic from the past, you can still compile the source code Microsoft has released and run the app on Windows 10 today. The source code is available on GitHub, and is maintained by Microsoft veteran Craig Wittenberg under the MIT license. Wittenberg copied the File Manager code from Windows NT 4 back in 2007, and has been maintaining it before open sourcing it recently. It's a testament to the backward compatibility of Windows itself, especially that this was originally included in Windows more than 20 years ago.
not in apples sandbox! and soon mac os will be just as locked down.
How about open sourcing the Midi Manager so we can run that on Windows 10.
I like my old games with MIDI music to use my hardware, not your awful software implementation.
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It's a testament to the backward compatibility of Windows itself, especially that this was originally included in Windows more than 20 years ago.
Gee, that would date this code to about the same time we were doing the POSIX standards that codified a (then) 20 year old Unix interface.
They should import the source immediately.
Not sure how well it holds up, but I remember strongly preferring to keep using the old "File Manager" even when "Explorer" became the preferred solution when Windows 95 was released. Not sure where along the way I begrudgingly gave it up (probably as long filenames became more popular - IIRC it was always limited to the 8.3 format).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
This seems more like Microsoft tossing bread to the Open Source community, appearing to be generous, while they are just interested in watching the infighting for the scraps.
The File Manager is something that is relatively easy to make yourself, especially from such an old version. If they were to release the one they are using currently, that may mean a bit more. Just as it has a lot more features that may take a while to catalog and implement yourself.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Really?
I mean there has to be a bazillion alternative file manages for Windows out there if you don't like Explorer for some reason and power shell and or good old cmd.exe/command.com + xcopy, deltree and friends won't cut it for you.
Even back in 1993 - winfile was something people without a copy of Norton Desktop used; in other words poor people, and folks with no common sense.
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Here I had my heart all set on getting Clippy back onto my Windows 10 You're Totally Fucked Spring Edition and they give me File Manager? WTF!?!? Talk about lame.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Microsoft's Windows file manager was crap enough when it was current that I paid for a third-party alternative.
The things it has going for it over today's file manager include:
- only focused elements are highlighted (can't count how many times I've deleted the wrong files because of focus being somewhere other than where it appeared to be -- files A was highlighted but Windows was actually focused on file B; I tapped Del to delete A but Windows deleted B)
- show file extensions (not even an option to hide them! what feckwit has left "hide extensions" the default for so many years?)
- distinguishable UI elements: buttons are clearly buttons, scroll bars are always visible, etc.
- overall not-flat UI
...THE reference file management tool for PC geeks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander
I still use Midnight Commander on Linux from time to time, especially for quick side-by-side file/dir moves (the viewing of diff's between them is nice) and searching for content inside lots of files
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Commander
Pasting editable spreadsheets into Word/Powerpoint was always pretty handy, if quirky.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Please!!!
I wish they'd release the source for the file manager that came with Win98 and Win2K, and I wish somebody would port it to Linux. The only decent Linux file manager I've found is Dolphin, and its deps are pretty much all of KDE core, which is huge - especially when compared with the XFCE environment I'd be using it in. I want a file manager with an integrated search function that will actually search inside files for a specified text string. Right now I use the Gnome search tool. It isn't integrated into the file manager, it's buggy, and its UI sucks, but it's the best available, short of installing the bloated and bling-laden KDE. Pretty much the only thing I miss about Windows is the File Manager. Well, except for the fact that Windows applications use File Manager for their load and save functions, which makes the interface much more consistent from one application to the next. Having a mix of GTK2, GTK3, and program-specific file dialogs like those in Libre Office, is just sucky.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
print a list of files in a directory, like Dir>PRN.
Pretty much the only thing I miss about Windows is the File Manager.
I really don't think it's that great.Then again I usually have to struggle to keep it as "details", no thumbnails, no metadata, show extensions, shows hidden files, please don't hang when I right click a file and it loads who knows how many extra handlers.
Well, except for the fact that Windows applications use File Manager for their load and save functions, which makes the interface much more consistent from one application to the next. Having a mix of GTK2, GTK3, and program-specific file dialogs like those in Libre Office, is just sucky.
One downside is it's a little too rich for its own good. I remember back in the day under poor attempts to lock down a machine by hiding explorer, "run" from start menu, my computer, etc could be circumvented by opening the open window of an allowable application, and navigating to cmd.exe/command.com.
One upside is in WinPE / WinRE that doesn't have access to a file manager, you can open notepad from the cmd window, open the open dialog, and get a bare bones explorer window for basic file management.
What do you do to maintain code that's 28 years old that nobody uses? Was he updating it for Windows 10? Shows what I know about it.
i never understood why windows defaults to "hide extensions for known file types" -- in what god damn universe is that a GOOD idea?
I am not a dev but always interested in the stuff that goes on here. Could this be of any benefit to the ReactOS team?
In a universe where the 99% ruin it for the 1%. Hide file extensions for 99% of people that don't need them, let the 1% un-check the box.
Sounds to me like someone inside Microsoft grabbed the source code for the NT4 version of File Manager and patched it up for his own personal use on internal systems. Then he asked his manager if he could release it on Github so he could use it at home, too.
He was probably completely shocked when he actually got approval.
I'd be shocked if it was part of any particular open source strategy on the part of Microsoft.
Lameness filter encountered. Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition.
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i never understood why windows defaults to "hide extensions for known file types"
I agree it was never a good idea. IMHO it was done because the file extensions are ugly.
On the Mac, every file has a "resource fork" (I guess on OS X it's no longer properly a "resource fork" but there is something equivalent) and the type of the file is coded in a spot that the OS knows how to read but which the user doesn't see. So the user types any name, and the icon is the right icon and the user just sees the icon and the chosen name.
On Windows and Linux, the file systems don't have this "resource fork" idea, so the obvious place to encode the type of file is the extension. But the extension is user-visible.
Linux uses the techniques pioneered in UNIX to just identify a file no matter what its name is. If it's an ELF binary, it will start with certain bytes arranged a certain way; if it's a LibreOffice document, it will start with different bytes, etc. It's trickier but more reliable: you can rename a LibreOffice document to not have its extension any more, and your file manager can still do the right thing when you double-click on it.
But Windows just uses the extension.
Well, hiding the extension makes Windows more like the Mac. The icon is correct, the user just sees the filename chosen by the user, life is great.
But users are used to seeing extensions and don't worry about them much. And there was a form of attack where a Trojan Horse file would have a name like "Important Document.doc.exe" and hope the user would open it. If Windows hides the extension, then just the ".exe" part is hidden, and the user just sees "Important Document.doc" (and as I said the user is used to seeing extensions and doesn't freak out that most documents have no visible extension but this one does).
These days, by default, Windows hides "system" directories and anything else that an uninformed user shouldn't touch. If I have to use Windows, I make sure to turn on seeing file extensions, disable hiding system directories, etc.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
grep -r search *
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
"compile the source code and run the app" is where we know the article was written by a non-programmer.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
They open sourced the file manager SO THAT it can run on Windows 10? But according to the summary it already does and that is the greatness blah blah blah. Open sourcing it doesn't change whether it works or not. And windows 10 already has a file manager so they don't need the old one to work anyway.
This story seems pointless.
That is the sad truth about current Windows, while quite many things have become better, a lot has become worse. The file manager is hardly the worst culprit, but is definitely among the many things they have borked.
Even better - Run Directory Opus (Windows) on Linux - I already have!
I have run it on Suse 10 It's far superior to the Windows File manager. I used DirOpus on the Amiga and it was awesome then too.
The Truth is a Virus!!!
I always figured it was a cheap and dirty hack to keep people from accidentally deleting the extension.
Prevents the:
Copy
Paste
Rename
WTF did it go?
What really irritates me is that Linux filemanagers cant figure out that right click and dragging and icon is supposed to pop up a context menu when it is dropped on the destination to select if you want to copy or move. Many file managers wont even ask at all. Very annoying behaviour.
Pre-OSX MacOS didn't use file extensions at all... The filesystem used a separate metadata fork to determine file type, and wasn't reliant on something as arbitrary as the file name.
For a system which depends upon and makes decisions based upon the file extension, hiding them is stupid, and for a system that makes no use of the file extensions hiding them (if even present at all) is irrelevant.
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If you deleted a bunch of files, it would refresh the entire list between every delete, causing it to take an agonizingly long time. Copy / paste had the same problem.
They fixed this in Windows 3.1, and then proceeded to find ways to make the process take longer ever since, mostly by trying to compute how long the process would take. Nowadays, it takes Windows as long to do the time calculation, as it would to just delete the files!
What really irritates me is that Linux filemanagers cant figure out that right click and dragging and icon is supposed to pop up a context menu when it is dropped on the destination to select if you want to copy or move. Many file managers wont even ask at all. Very annoying behaviour.
Interesting! I never even used that functionality in Windows Explorer - didn't know it existed. But now that you mention it I think I HAVE seen it a few times, accidentally. I guess by the time I noticed I'd been stuck in my accustomed workflow for long enough that it never even occurred to me to use it.
Not directly on the topic of file managers, but closely tied to it, is the whole mimetypes / file extension / "Open With" ugly mess that makes Linux desktop environments such a PITA to use. Plain text files, (for example), may need to be openable by several different types of applications. Back before KiCad changed its file structure, its PCB and schematic files were plain text. But they had their own extensions, and in Windows it was easy to just assign a program for a particular extension. In Windows, I could open KiCad files in a text editor, and often did - but I had it set up so that a double-click opened them in KiCad. Not so easy in Linux, where the concept of a filetype independent of extension is pretty rigidly enforced. If I set dot-pcb or dot-sch files to open in KiCad by default, then dot-txt files also open in it. I've also run into the problem with other file types,.I suppose it's possible to get around that in Linux, but in many hours of trying I never managed to get it to work. Those rules also seem to be handled in multiple places, and they interfere with each other. I've given up and learned to accept it, but it still pisses me off sometimes that Windows Explorer was far more seamless and consistent 20 years ago than any Linux DE / file manager combo is today.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Microsoft Office uses OLE extensively. Any object embedded in an MS Office document is (was?) an OLE object.
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At least they used to, not sure about Windows 10.
I managed to hack together a semi-functional desktop environment that looked like Windows 3.1 because NT 3.51 apps looked the same and were compiled for 32-bit Windows APIs.
now release the rest of the windows 3.1 sourcode.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
All it has ever done is make misdirection work by allowing malicious actors to hide the extension.
The extension is *definitely* not the problem there.
Having the exact same action ("double click") perform two entirely distinct functions:
1. View a file
2. Execute a program with all of the permissions of the current user
is the issue. In what universe is *that* a good idea?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
This, times 1,000!
Do file extensions actually confuse users? No, that's ridiculous. Even computer illiterate users? Still no, they either ignore, or treat them as part of the file name like everyone else. It just seems condescending, really.
Do they help identify the file type, useful if you're searching for a particular file? Duh. (Unless there's some malware or something going on) Does lack of showing file extensions cause confusion to average Windows users? I think so; at least, all the data entry personnel where I work, for the most part they think of computers as word processors, calculators, and Facebook machines. They want a file restored but can't tell me the extension because it's hidden, and there are four or more files with the "name" they gave me. Access databases were great for that.
It is probably the most stupid thing MS insists on doing, it unnecessarily dumbs down their users, and the first thing I disable on any workstation I use. Or come across. I've never had anyone complain.
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This isn't very interesting at this point IMO but if they could opensource the whole Windows 7 UI so that it could run in Win 10 that would be something else :P