Windows File Manager (WinFile) repository archived on March 1, 2025
36 comments
·April 22, 2025userbinator
jug
True, probably pretty feature complete after all these years although a pretty major lacking feature for any serious use is no UNC path support.
Dwedit
The control used is a ListBox, and not a ListView, because we're dealing with pre-Windows 95 software here. As a consequence, you can't use Ctrl+Arrow Keys to move the selection, and Space to toggle selection for a file. Yet you can ctrl+click files.
eek2121
Thankfully, it is open source! Dig in! :D
You guys really should gift some kudos to Microsoft. As crappy as they can be, they often open source stuff.
Also, TIL that this apparently been open sourced for years.
munchler
TIL that Microsoft has been maintaining the original Windows File Manager for the last 30+ years.
kurtoid
Not continuously. They revived and open-sourced it in 2018
nashashmi
Quite fast. Faster than the current explorer.
7bit
> We realize this may come as a shock and disappointment to our contributors but we simply do not have the expertise or resources within the organization to continue to maintain this project.
Resources ... Okay. What truly comes as a shock is the fact that Microsoft says they don't have expertise to continue this project. I mean, who is building Windows then? It's the same building blocks, no?!
zifpanachr23
My theory: every (I'm exaggerating, more like most) systems programmer in the company was told to join Azure or get cut. Then outsourcing or something. It's been obvious that they don't have many experienced people left to work on native windows stuff for a while now. The constant churn in the platform apis and everything getting turned into a web app was the sign.
whatever1
They pretty much say that the company gutted their team to the point they cannot support the project anymore.
Given the latest layoff rounds there is also good chance that indeed they fired the people who had the expertise on this.
generalpf
Who would want to work on this thing? It hasn't been a standard part of Windows for at least a decade.
eek2121
Win16/Win32 is going the way of the dinosaur. Many of those devs have retired or moved on.
I am personally a huge fan of win32. I was even a ReactOS contributor at one point because of this. That being said, it wasn’t scalable without major changes. Thankfully most win32 apps still work on Windows.
jujube3
> I mean, who is building Windows then?
Armies of H1Bs frantically copying and pasting from Stack Overflow until something compiles.
userbinator
These days it's more likely to be AI, possibly Microsoft's own Copilot.
munchler
Given the use of the singular pronoun “I” in the readme, I suspect that this was a one-person project within Microsoft, and that person is no longer available.
lousken
they don't have the expertise? oh right, since it takes 10 seconds to load a right click context menu on the desktop in w11, no wonder /s
Yakomonaketo
I think it's mostly because of the many registry entries like context shell handlers
dboreham
Only about 1s here. Wasn't the 10 second thing because it was looking for a now-absent floppy drive?
rep_lodsb
That's still billions of CPU instructions being run. If you spent the rest of your life locked in some Tibetan monastery, going through all the steps by hand on paper, you wouldn't even get 1% of the way to rendering this single context menu.
The amount of bloat in modern software is simply obscene.
kevin_thibedeau
It depends on how many shell extensions you have installed. How something so basic can drag a supercomputer to its knees is puzzling but MS never fails to deliver.
Dwedit
The worst is if you have a registered Shell Extension that lives on a network drive (true story).
kmeisthax
One wonders if it would be possible to invoke those extensions asynchronously and put a little "loading" icon where any new shell items might appear. Or have a hard 2s timeout after which any latecomers get shoved behind another layer of menus.
immibis
Its a disease all over software engineering. We add just enough layers of abstraction, but no more, to make it about ten times slower than a Commodore 64. The excuse is that it's to avoid having to think end-to-end as one human can't possibly think end-to-end these days. The reality is the reason they can't is because of all these useless indirection layers in the middle and if those were deleted, they could.
lifeisgood99
The simplest explanation would be that those shell extensions have poor performance.
petahpintah
Please be joking...
babypuncher
1 second is still an order of magnitude too long. Windows XP context menus were much snappier, on much weaker hardware. And XP was rather notorious for being bloated and slow at the time of its release...
Right clicks on my MacBook are perceptually instantaneous.
tiahura
MS hate aside, Windows 11 Explorer is a thing of beauty.
dole
The newly hijacked right-click context menu I suspect is a new source of hangs, flickers and explorer.exe auto-restarts. Love they added a special “restart” context menu entry in Task Manager especially for it.
Windows 10 Explorer was a perfect vehicle then they had to go and throw a shitty wrap and other afternarket trash on it.
Edit: nevermind the times you have to manually hit F5 so the file you just renamed displays the new name, instead of auto-refreshing. What the sweet hell did they do?
7bit
The Windows 11 Explorer is also buggy as shit. They still haven't solved the issue where folders within the Download folder randomly enable grouping again. Or you know, where you could click on the address bar and see the full path to the download folder, instead you see the word Download. Great fucking Job. They butchered the W10 explorer, painted it gold, and tapped themselves on the shoulder.
SirFatty
Well, and added tabs, which is really the best part.
Lammy
I have that on Windows 10 for all applications instead of just Explorer: https://www.stardock.com/products/groupy/
userbinator
Hell no. There's already a taskbar --- although that's another thing they've managed to screw up in Win11.
pests
There is a setting (maybe on by default?) you just click in the location bar and it turns back into an editble text field like normal.
Good. There wasn't much that needed changing anyway, it was nearly perfect as-is.