What is the "God Mode" folder in Windows 10, and how do I enable it? (2022) | Hacker News Reader

What is the "God Mode" folder in Windows 10, and how do I enable it? (2022)

howtogeek.com

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It is a sad commentary on current trends that basic admin functionality is considered 'god mode' that is hidden with secret passphrases. Good grief. I absolutely hate that PCs are being made into cell phones.

Websites for teenagers called this thing "god mode" in the days of early Windows Vista. People were excited to have found an undocumented CLSID and gave it a silly nickname.

This thing popping back up gave me some minor nostalgia. Pretty silly that it's still being presented as news, but I guess a whole generation of new sysadmins weren't even around the first time this popped up.

Its all stuff you can still get to, its just that this lists it in one place

It’s kind of natural that basic admin functions are kept out of the way of most users. Most people are only rarely be interested in configuring the depths of their computers.

> No, God Mode doesn't unlock any extra secret features in Windows or let you do any tweaking that you can't do in the regular Windows interface. Instead, it's simply a special folder you can enable that exposes most of Windows' admin, management, settings, and Control Panel tools in a single, easy-to-scroll-through interface.

Not sure what you think this says about current trends, when nothing is hidden or locked behind secret passphrases.

There are plenty of things to despise about the Windows and Microsoft, but a directory with a special name having shortcuts to things that are already accessible, might be very low on this ladder of shit.

I disagree. The trajectory is pretty clear if you remember what Windows 98 control panel looked like and then compare it to Windows 10. Things are slowly being removed outside user's view for one reason or another ( we can speculate about the why, but it is largely irrelevant as the end result is the same ).

It is admittedly a small thing. In a grand scheme of things, it is almost laughable given what MS has done so far. That said, small steps slowly erode the resistance we once had.

Not that long ago users would have revolted over 'always on' requirement for games that are not mmos. Now it is standard. Not that long ago users would have revolted over claims that a company collected data and sent it to the mothership. Now it is practically expected. All those started with small, negligible attempts that eventually broke the resistance.

> Things are slowly being removed outside user's view for one reason or another

What specific controls have been removed as of late? I've used Windows on/off since XP (and today use 11), mostly for professional audio stuff and some gaming, but as far as I can tell, everything that used to be accessible, still is. Some of it has different looks (like the sound device management) but a lot still look exactly the same (like the "Device Manager" or partition manager).

Hmm.. System Page seems relatively recent[1][2]. Again, small thing, but small things do add up.

- https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/system... - https://www.howtogeek.com/697152/where-did-the-system-contro...

Allegedly also works in Windows 11

https://www.xda-developers.com/how-to-enable-god-mode-window...

Confirmed it does work in Windows 11, and the desktop folder shortcut even gets assigned a special icon... however there is so much stuff in the folder I am not sure its really going to be that useful.

This is simply a Control Panel page with "All Tasks"...

You can simply run shell:::{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} or make shortcut "explorer.exe shell:::{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}"

Interesting.

Why doesn't MS just let us "pin" this to Quick Access like a folder

You can. Open the folder inside Explorer and use the ellipsis menu on the toolbar, there's an option to pin.

Unfortunately "pin to quick access" doesn't do anything for this "all tasks" folder.

On a tangent ...

Somethings I miss:

Ability to add a Folder as a "toolbar" to the taskbar.

Ability to keep the "calendar" window open while working on another window.

Ability to set custom date format say dd-mmm-yyyy in the system tray -- without changing Language/Region/Locale settings across the OS and all apps.

Desktop Widgets!

Isn’t this just… the Win9x/NT style control panel?

It's a special GUID registered in explorer that (I believe) lists all registered control panel applets and screens. The control panel is still there in Windows 11 (win+r, "control") but these applets are slowly being removed as the settings screen is getting more features.

This trick goes back to at least Windows XP.

For those of us who don't use windows regularly enough to remember the tool names, this is wonderful to know about.

This looks incredibly useful. Why is it a "hidden" feature and not enabled out of the box?

The Settings folder is back! I guess it had a hardcoded GUID?

They're pre-generated by Microsoft. There's a list in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID you can use to try and find new ones. They've also been documented online for at least a decade, so you can save yourself the trouble.

Very few of these CLSID folders are actually useful to have somewhere. An interesting, but underused, feature of Windows is that applications can actually register CLSIDs like these and host their own special "explorer" panels.

Very interesting, thanks. I'm not sure how valuable most of these are. But this seems to bring back the settings explorer panel, which I personally prefer.

I wonder what other UUIDs lead to.

Here's a list: https://www.elevenforum.com/t/list-of-windows-11-clsid-key-g...

Are there all that were implemented or only the ones actually observed?

You can try them for yourself. Last time I checked (back on Windows 7) they all worked. I don't think Microsoft has had any reason to remove the old ones, they're just part of the legacy control panel.

As a teenager on Windows 98, I think, I went through the CLSIDs in the registry and embedded them in folder names like this to see what happened. I don’t remember anything really cool happening, but I think I found a few special ones. One hung the system, or at least the shell, and my dad wasn’t happy about my experiments.

Also played with a feature where explorer would render your HTML when you opened the folder (maybe a desktop.ini setting), and there was probably a bit of JS integration possible.

How can I enable this on Arch, does anyone know?

Sudo.

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