blog: xplorer2 for windows 7

[Mr.Pleasant]

As I see it, X2 is a bit of a case of the "Law of the handicapped head start".
Folder junctions are in the OS since NTFS. Although a very useful feature, no (average) user knew what is was, because MS didn't make any tool to make use of it. But X2 came with features to paste folder junctions. (Unfortunately, I can only use it privately, because colleagues would find it utterly scary what this unknown application of mine would do to their file system.)

These 'libraries' is another example: for file-intensive work we should 've had something like this ten years ago. X2 had the scrap containers long time ago, even before, if I remember well, Mac came up with the Smartfolders (which aren't as smart as the scraps, btw). Now, many years later, all of a sudden (lions roaring, drums beating, trumpets and everything) MicroSoft has Libaries (capital L).
A bit late though.
But... if MS is introducing a new way of sorting files, it somehow gets this mountain high urge over everything else, and all other 3rd party tools have to follow. Even if the 3rd party tool already has something similar, even if the implementation might be better (often the case when compared with MS), this new MS feature becomes the Absolute New Standard.
As with the blog, but now from a user's point of view, I feel this same yawn coming up when I think of how in the near future this new old thing will look me in the eye, cheered by the same people who couldn't see any point in scrap.... Oh, well, yes. That's correct actually: I haven't even tried W7 and its libraries. (OMG, now y'all going to kill me.)

Resistance to change is of course a bad thing, specially when it comes to software, but what is it that MS makes this resistance so damn' tempting?

[Thracx]

here's the comment area for today's blog article found here:
http://zabkat.com/blog/07Jun09-windows7-explorer.htm

Good work nikos - I'll be sure to give it a whirl in Win7 x64 soon!

from the first steps of xplorer2 i was more than happy to accommodate everything that played by the desktop shell rules. So zipfolders are in. RAR are not.

Sadly   Maybe one day one of us developers will get un-lazy and write a shell wrapper for RAR so that we'd have it in all file browsers.


In this post, other view modes (tiles, stack) is one thing that is in the Win7 Explorer but not in X² - do you plan to add this to X²?  While this certainly isn't a killer feature, if Windows has more view modes it's probably best to go ahead and add support for them.

[nikos]

for archives and 7-zip there's still a faint hope for shell integration
http://7zipshell.codeplex.com/
i tried to contact the guy but to no avail

[fgagnon]

Shell integration would be good, as it seems more and more folks are using zipfolders with expectation they behave no differently from regular folders.

[Thracx]

for archives and 7-zip there's still a faint hope for shell integration
http://7zipshell.codeplex.com/
i tried to contact the guy but to no avail

I recall happening upon that page before.  It still looks abandoned, which is a shame.


This article talks about how to use the 7-Zip archive dlls to access various archive formats in C#.  It doesn't seem like it would be a difficult task to implement a shell wrapper for these 7-Zip archive dlls, as his C# code looks simple enough and I'm sure 7-Zip has documented their dlls.

But it doesn't seem like anyone has done that yet, so perhaps it's a lot more challenging than it sounds?  I had thought about doing this myself but I know way too little about shell extensions and I couldn't find any good introductory programming guides.

...i was more than happy to accommodate everything that played by the desktop shell rules. So zipfolders are in...

You mentioned that you had to work to support zipfolders - care to explain briefly what this entailed?  So if a developer followed the 'desktop shell rules' and wrapped the 7-Zip dlls, X² (and Explorer) would be able to browse rar/7zip/etc files without extra fiddling on your part?  It's probably best to take this conversation into PMs if you want to continue it.

[nikos]

no i didn't have to work hard to accommodate zipfolders, somebody wrote a shell extension (MS) and since it was according to shell speck xplorer2 could get into them full power. I suspect this is the plan behind that 7-zip extension, if and when it completes. I also popped the question to the main 7-zip developer but he didn't want to hear about windows explorer

[Thracx]

...somebody wrote a shell extension (MS) and since it was according to shell speck xplorer2 could get into them full power...

Exactly what kind of handler is it?  Nothing from this intro article seem to imply being able to handle browsing like what zipfldr.dll does, but obviously it is possible.  Is it just a search handler?  Another type not in that article?  I apologize for being ignorant of shell programming but I think if I could find something useful to explain the basics then I might be able to figure out how far along that 7-Zip Shell Extension project is and perhaps resume it.

PS.  I did try the new X² build last night in Win7x64 and it works great - drive bar is back!  Kudos->Nikos!

[nikos]

what you need is a rooted browsable namespace extension, it's mostly boilerplate code but quite complex and possibly nightmarish if you want to support all windows OS. Here is an introduction article

[Thracx]

what you need is a rooted browsable namespace extension, it's mostly boilerplate code but quite complex and possibly nightmarish if you want to support all windows OS. Here is an introduction article

Thanks for the article Nikos.  I had found another article on CodeProject that was a good introduction but this one is a lot more thorough and fills in some gaps.
A rooted browsable namespace extension doesn't seem precisely what we want - we want to be able to open archive files like zipfldr.dll does - but I think I've got how to turn this rooted extension into that.  I hope now it's just a matter of finding 10 or so hours of free development time

[IainB]

I am a long-time user of 2xplorer, and then, later, xplorer².

xplorer² seems to be a brilliant piece of software, and a powerful file management tool. It is not necessarily trivial to use though, and I have sometimes had to work hard to understand how best to take advantage of its myriad features.

I once discussed a new feature (change) with Nikos, in email, and after initially thinking that he was reluctant to change, I realised that the proposed change did not mesh with xplorer²'s design - a design that seems to follow the KISS Principle ("Keep it Short and Simple"), and which uses the existing standards and services built into the acknowledged buggy Windows OS. The developer wisely avoids spending time/effort creating bolt-ons to compensate for "missing" or buggy features of the OS, expecting that they will be fixed in a future release, but he cannot fail to see at that intimate level of working, the warts and all - i.e., just how buggy it really is.

Any craftsman working with materials of mixed quality to produce something excellent will always see the defects in the materials, and will work with them rather than against them. That is just what Nikos seems to have done.

Where snakebyte and wasker seemed happy in the thread above to criticise Nikos for a "resistance to change", they employed a logical fallacy - an argumentum ad hominem. As soon as you do that, you take your eyes off the argument - in this case, Nikos' rationale: he works with and within what has been designed and built into the OS, and particularly the desktop shell and file management services. When we get to W7 it has "Libraries" - but, hang on, they are a kludgy fix, as Nikos explains, and furthermore we know that Vista-->W7 is just a tarted up ß product path, where M$ seem to have changed the name of a disaster and given it some new clothes to make it look like a New Thing. All the while M$ will be hurriedly trying to fix it up. The parallels drawn with Chrysler are very apt.

So xplorer² uses the junctions, not exactly like W7ß Libraries, but when M$ have fixed up W7ß to similar rock-stable status as XP arguably is (and remember how long that has taken so far, and it's still not quite there), then I would predict Nikos already has in mind a plan as to how he will approach the issue of the Lilbrary service. For the moment, as he says:

"There is going to be a sizeable x2 update in the near future but not for libraries, surely!"

I can't help but agree - it's kudos-->Nikos.
Whilst we might not be able to see or understand his rationale - unless he spells it out - we can see the product of his thinking embedded in xplorer², and we use it daily.

We cannot help being irrational by nature, but, even if you are frustrated by not having a feature that is in W7ß, there seems to be no justification for going ad hominem on this, and I would recommend those statements and the opinions that do that above should be reconsidered and retracted by the authors. They do the authors and Nikos a disservice, and do not not really belong in a forum where you would expect reason and civility to prevail.

What I would be interested in seeing is some solid and compelling reasoning (not opinions) presented here that substantiates why Nikos should incorporate the Libraries into xplorer². If that was available, then I feel sure that Nikos could change his mind - despite what JK Galbraith said:

"When given the choice between changing one's mind and proving one's point of view, most people get busy with the proof."

[TiKu]

X2 definitely blows EXP, but EV/E7 is way better than EXP and much more visually pleasant than X2.

I strongly disagree. The new Explorer was one reason why I switched back from Vista to XP after 3 months in early 2007. I gave Vista a 2nd chance in 2008 and am still using it, but I still see the new Explorer as a big step backward. I wrote everything about WDS that needs to be said in my blog that Nikos has linked, so I won't repeat it here. But WDS is not the only annoying new feature of Windows Explorer. Try to tell it in which view mode to display your folders. I've given up.

To those complaining about the decreased development speed of xplorer²: I'm a developer myself (mainly shell and UI - just like Nikos) and can tell you one reason for the decreased dev speed: documentation. Although Microsoft has been sentenced for not documenting big parts of the Windows API, they still play dirty games. If they write documentation, it's very often highly incomplete or even plain wrong and many things are not documented at all. For instance I've spent many months trying to find out how to get the fancy Aero drag images because I wanted my programs to look modern. I could have done many other things meanwhile, if Microsoft would have documented Aero drag images. Vista and 7 introduce many new things to the shell API - things Nikos has to cope with but which are not really documented.

[MegaZapFan]

...Try to tell it in which view mode to display your folders. I've given up.

Right??!?!?

Is that not annoying as hell?   What's no better is answering "yes to all" repeatedly.... dammit, when I say "yes to all" I mean "yes to all and stop nagging me!"

I've touted Nikos' robust copy system before and will do so again here... This is what MS should have implemented from day one.  Don't allow a single point of failure in a multiple-source copy/move operation to cause the entire transaction to fail.  Shame on you MS...  Bravo to you, Nikos!

[IainB]

@wasker:

"EV/E7 is ... much more visually pleasant than X2"

I am unsure as to whether that was a requirement. For the record, I am not one of those that might have been looking for a "visually pleasing" appearance in a file manager. I want a no-nonsense xplorer² with good ergonomics and useful visual flags (e.g., the highlighting of tabs as in Vista), and with no "noisy" distractions, adverts or unnecessary system overhead. (Which is what I have got, thanks to Nikos.)

@snakebyte: As I said to you in private discussion, whether W7 and its Libraries functionality is in ß would seem to be a matter of conjecture/opinion. For example, you commented elsewhere that

"Given that W7 is in RC stage, I would bet this is the final version of this feature."

- which is a matter of opinion, and I wonder if Nikos' opinion might be the reverse.

So, @Nikos: Are you able to summarise your thoughts about what it would take to encourage you to see some point in working to duplicate the Libraries functionality in xplorer²?
That is:
     Under what circumstances would it make sense for you to put in the
     effort to duplicate/support the W7 Libraries functionality in xplorer²?

I ask this partly on behalf of snakebyte (to whom I suggested the question), because I haven't found anything like a comprehensive set of concise reasoning about that either being asked for or given in this discussion thread. If it is there, then it has only come out in bits and pieces - difficult to perceive a solid logical structure from these ad hoc communications on a BB discussion forum like this.

[nikos]

when we are talking about libraries as they are in windows explorer, the ball is over to MS side to really complete the implementation to shell standards so that the tree works properly (they might do that until the final version of W7).

if we are talking about a virtual folder like libraries organized in subfolders, extending the flat mode of scraps in xplorer2 with hierarchies, this is an old idea that i have in the list of things to do that will one day come to a monitor near you

i share timo's feelings about the quality of documentation for new features. Whereas windows popularity was partially (mostly) built on good solid documentation that allowed people like me to write quality software and make the platform useful, nowadays (post-vista) i believe that the "documentation" of the features is done by bots and is good for nobody. Coupled with the explosion of new and ever changing features, they'd better bring bill gates back to put some order in the house. We are heading back to the MSDOS era where each developer had to write his own windows/UI along with the real functionality  :x

[snakebyte]

i share timo's feelings about the quality of documentation for new features. Whereas windows popularity was partially (mostly) built on good solid documentation that allowed people like me to write quality software and make the platform useful, nowadays (post-vista) i believe that the "documentation" of the features is done by bots and is good for nobody. Coupled with the explosion of new and ever changing features, they'd better bring bill gates back to put some order in the house. We are heading back to the MSDOS era where each developer had to write his own windows/UI along with the real functionality  :x

And why are we bashing MS again? It is easier putting blame on someone else than taking responsibility. Has anyone even tried looking for dev documentation and related videos on new Win7 features?

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/develo ... aries.aspx

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/develo ... fault.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd861346.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... S.85).aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... S.85).aspx


I understand that some the above API documentation is auto generated from code, but this is Win7 RC release and content of these documents will evolve over time as stated in the document as
[This documentation is preliminary and is subject to change.]

PS: How is Amazon's Mechanical Turk and Microsoft related?