Infotips are the little text windows that popup when you hover over an item in some pane in 2x. If you can't see any you either have old (pre-2000) windows or you haven't activated infotips from View | Options | Usability page. The good thing about them is that you can customize them so as to display the kind of information you are interested in, per file type. The only qualification required is some experience with editing the registry. On the other hand, if the word "registry" reminds you more of newborn babies and marriages, then I wouldn't recommend reading any further
The default infotips come from the InfoTip value found under the registry key HKEY CLASSES ROOT\*. Settings in this key affect all items in the shell namespace. On my win2000 system this default setting is:
Code: Select all
InfoTip = prop:Type;Author;Title;Subject;Comment;SizeThere are standard properties you can show as seen in the above example, with names closely matching the column titles in explorer. You'll find the full list of simple properties in MSDN (scroll down or search for the "Infotip Customization" section in that page).
Some properties are more useful than others. For example, the Comment field allows you to see comments inserted e.g. in Word documents or any file stored on an NTFS partition via it's property page -- how many users are using these? On the other hand having Size and Type popping up is mere waste of space and I recommend removing them from the default InfoTip key. These properties are available in 2xExplorer already anyroad.
The default infotip can be overriden for each different file type. If you want something else shown for a particular file type just add an InfoTip value under its ProgId key. So if you want to see the version of executable files in an infotip, locate HKCR\exefile (NOTE: not .exe), right-click on the right pane and add a new string value (REG_SZ), rename it to InfoTip and double-click on it to add this content:
prop:{0CEF7D53-FA64-11D1-A203-0000F81FEDEE},4
Whoa! what was that all about I hear you cry in dismay. Well, you'll recognize the "prop:" keyword that tells shell this is to be interpreted as a variable rather than a fixed string. The funny number within the {braces} is the unique identifier (fmtid) for this particular category of shell properties and the number 4 is the index within this category that corresponds to the module version. Where did I find all this info? Well I cheated a little since I found that programmatically. Microsoft again did the daft thing and didn't document important information. On the other hand they do mention some of these extended properties that can appear in infotips as a {fmtid},pid pair (i.e. category identifier and property id number as in the above example). Out of the above link the most important property should be the pair {9B174B34-40FF-11D2-A27E-00C04FC30871},4 which shows you the owner of a file.
Note that you can have many such {fmtid},pid pairs in an infotip, separated by semicolons. You can have plain property names mixed in as well, as e.g. in:
prop:Comment;{fmtid},pid;Size;{fmtid2},pid2
There are other undocumented properties that give information for audio files but I won't present them here since most good multimedia programs install their own infotip handlers and show all the information you need. The other day I installed dbPowerAmp and I was surprised to see an infotip that barely fitted in the screen -- a bit over the top arguably.
You can't control these kind of infotips by registry editing. In fact if you see a key like
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mp3\ShellEx\{00021500-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
you shouldn't add any InfoTip values for such file types lest you want to screw up the intended information.
If that was a bit too taxing for you, fear not because in xplorer² all this information will be available as normal columns in the detailed view mode, so you wouldn't need to poke about with cryptic numbers just to get a file's version in a lame infotip. Future so bright I gotta wear shades
(Don't answer that. 
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