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Comment by thristian | Hacker News Reader

Fun facts:

The reserved names are things like "COM" and "LPT" followed by a digit... or at least, a thing that Unicode recognises as a digit, so "COM²" is just as broken as "COM2".

This device remapping is done in the Win32 layer, not the NT kernel, so you can often use "verbatim path syntax" to bypass these hacks. So "C:\Temp\COM2.TXT" is a magic device, but "\\?\C:\Temp\COM2.TXT" is an ordinary file you can read or write without issue... until you try and look into C:\Temp with a program that doesn't use verbatim paths like Windows Explorer, and all hell breaks loose.

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It amazes me that Windows Explorer (literally the most common way of interacting with files directly in windows) has so many limitations...

Sometimes I find interesting things in it. For example, you can open a terminal set to the current directory by putting cmd in the path bar. This also works with other commands and arguments, so you can do stuff like notepad [filename].

Know how to get admin cmd this way?

Try Ctrl+Shift+Return instead of just Return for launching.

In the Ribbon version of Explorer (ie, since Windows 8), open folder in Command Prompt was added to the File menu.

It amazes me that (a) it has an unhealthy relationship with the task bar - eg crashing it can take the task bar down too, (b) MS keeping messing about with it and removing useful things (c) 1989's xtree was better, (d) its search is horrible (e) like you say, that any of these issues are a thing considering how central it is to all Windows users

I still use ZtreeW64 almost every day. It's a clone of the old xtree and still very useful.

Interesting, had never heard of this before:

http://www.ztree.com/html/ztreewin.htm

Thanks for that. May I also recommend "Everything" [0] - multi-drive search is very useful for people like me with an unholy number of files.

0: https://www.voidtools.com/downloads/

Not enough people know about Everything. It's excellent, small, and faster than Windows search will ever be.

Everything _is_ really good, but my ancient CPU doesn't like it running in the background all the time. My search needs are few enough and localised enough that I've found Agent Ransack to be the best option for me.

And to be honest I haven't found any significant search performance difference, compared to the indexed-search options.

As someone who hasn't used any Explorer-alternatives before - what makes it so useful, and who would you recommend it to?

Explorer == Shell. The Explorer windows you see in the shell are merely windows.

I think the point was more that Explorer is a single program doing two wildly different things with little overlap. While what should/shouldn't be divided into multiple programs is very subjective, I doubt you'd find many programmers that agree that the functionality of the file explorer and the taskbar should be the same program. It's also confusing to users who tried to access a non-existent network share, and their taskbar locks up [ignoring the fact that neither of the programs should lock up anyway].

There is an option to run (file) Explorer windows in a separate process from the Explorer instance that's powering the shell, although even after all these years it's not on by default.

eg crashing it can take the task bar down too

The taskbar is managed by Explorer.

... and there's the unhealthy relation. Task bar should look be responsible for .. the task bar, and the explorer should just be a view into the file system. There is zero sane engineering justification for the two to have any relationship whatsoever.

Isn't that what the"Start folder windows in a separate process" setting is for? More stability at the expense of more memory and less responsiveness. In the days of Windows 95 it was actually beneficial to not do that. Nowadays, not so much, I guess. Although it's been ages that Explorer crashed on me. Not having too many shell extensions probably helps here.

I think that "new process" menu option is a bit of a lie. I use it every time, but I've had supposedly separate Explorer windows (including the task bar) crash simultaneously.

Due to how the whole Windows Shell mechanism works (COM all the way down) there will still be lot of shared state between the supposedly separate processes.

Not as much in Windows 8+ since it seems that the "Windows Shell Experience Host" process started taking over increasingly more of the taskbar duties. It still seems possible for particularly bad Explorer process crashes to crash the Windows Shell Experience Host (presumably due to COM communication channels between them?), but not every Explorer crash affects the Shell Experience Host anymore. (More interesting now is when the Shell Experience Host crashes; Explorer tends to keep working just fine, and unlike before, opening a new Explorer window doesn't guarantee that the Shell Experience Host reboots.)

> (d) its search is horrible

This one caught me by surprise a few months ago when I helped out someone using Windows. I knew the files were there, but couldn't for the life of me find them. Turns out there was some search setting that prevented search to traverse all dirs... Wasted hours. In the end I googled how to search in Windows. Absolutely awful UX.

If you feel the current search needs improvement, you might be happy to discover it's being worked on:

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/10/24/annou...

Refer to the Enhanced Mode for Search Indexer section of that page.

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