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Comment by kristianp | Hacker News Reader

Windows explorer is seriously slow on Windows 10. Things like the right-click menu and creating a new folder are too slow for what is done. The new item menu is very slow, perhaps due to having office 365 installed? Creating a new folder sometimes doesn't update the display of the containing folder at all.

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The built-in image viewer application in Windows 10 takes so long to start up that it's outright unusable for its purpose.

It also has a large permanent gutter, can't successfully fullscreen an image, can't switch images while zoomed (really common lately but still dumb), resizes to some third size if you double click on it twice(??), and loses its zoom state if you switch desktops.

Seriously the worst image viewer I've ever seen.

Someone from Microsoft, I know you are reading this, please explain to us how this makes it all the way to launch like this.

Same as everywhere else: some managers needed to justify a promotion.

P.S. not from MS

Their priority seems to be to make their "programs" "apps" so PCs are indistinguishable from cell phones. It may make business sense to them as so many of these companies are aiming to be everything to everyone, but it doesn't make user sense because if I wanted my PC to work like a phone, I wouldn't have just saved the money and stuck with my phone. They're also trying to make their apps to be social magnets to sell news stories, movies, music . . . it's very tiresome.

And all the more irritating because they had a perfectly usable image viewer which they could have used.

Data point of 1, but mine is as fast as anything. On my 7 year old desktop, upgraded from 7 to 10, its near instant. But given almost anything can hook into that menu (i.e. I have winrar, vscode, treesize, etc) it probably comes down to what you have running.

How's your start menu?

The second data point to the OP: I have a brand new laptop 16gb RAM and an SSD drive. When I mouse over "new", it takes 3-4 seconds for "folder" to appear. This is first thing in the morning with only Opera running. I do have a bunch of tabs open, but it does this without my browser running as well.

I concur. I handle video files on a SSD, it can take 2-3 seconds to just view a folder with one file inside. All I want is the file name and an icon but apparently in 2019 this is an Herculean tasks.

I really wish we could turn off what appears to be a deep scan of all the files every time one opens a directory in Windows 10. I just need to see the filenames to do what I want 99% of the time.

"This folder contains a single .wav file. I'll automatically switch over to an artist / album / etc view, and hide all the details you normally see"

It all depends on what hooks up into the context menu. The vanilla menu is fast. But once you accrue some unpackers, file sharing, VCS tools and garbage like Intel graphics drivers, the context menu gets unusably slow.

One part of me says Microsoft still needs to take responsibility for managing the experience.

"git-torrent is lowing your system down, do you want to disable it?"

Another says careful what you wish for, don't want everything to be locked down like Apple do you?

Microsoft does this with Outlook add-ins. Many people accidentally disable them, or wonder where their Skype add-in went to when Outlook killed it because it took too long to load.

I'm using a CalDAV add-in to Outlook and it gets stopped every now and then. It seems pretty lightweight, and my guess is that Outlook is so borked that it causes the problem itself and then mistakenly attributes it to the add-in.

I drop to a command prompt quite often to do a dir /S thatfile.exe

Finding that file via Explorer search takes 10 minutes. Via dir, it somehow takes 10 seconds or less.

I use Everything from Void Tools.

I use Total Commander on Windows, Midnight Commander and DoubleCmd on Linux. All nice and instant with plethora of operations. Not sure why Explorer type UI dominates.

Off-topic story time. So, midnight commander has a nice feature where you hit a hot key to drop into a full-screen shell of the tab which is currently selected. Back in the early 2000’s it had some sort of bug where it would sometimes drop you into a shell where PWD was from the _opposite_ tab.

And of course, the one time this bit me was when I issued ‘rm -rf *’, suddenly realized the command was taking waaaay too long, ctrl-c’ed it, and felt the blood drain from my face as I realized I had just lost 1/4 of my mp3’s.

Not a bad first text editor though. Cut my programming teeth with it.

The weird thing is that these are solved problems.

The most impressive, simple piece of software I've tried is a search tool called Everything.

I thought search was just hard and slow. Everything indexes every drive in seconds and searches instantly. I imagine it must be used by law enforcement to deal with security by obscurity.

I agree, I think there are a few things in the Windows file explorer that conspire against its good performance (file preview is a big factor, but recycle bin content seems to affect it too), and it does seem to get worse over time. I think there's a market now for a third party 'back to basics' explorer.

Classic Shell, but Windows 10 updates sort of broke it

7z file explorer works well for me. Now I am mostly using Linux though.

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