Open a folder and you get a listing, in place, with Up, Back and Ahead arrows like a browser's. So far, so Explorer. The difference is in the columns. Desktop Minder offers the handful every file has—size, dates, attributes—plus whatever the kinds of file in this folder have to say for themselves. A folder of MP3s offers Title, Artist, Length and Bit rate; a folder of photographs offers Width, Height and F-stop; a folder of neither offers neither. Columns that can be written can be edited right in the cell, the way you'd rename a file, so fixing an album's track titles doesn't mean opening a tag editor. Each folder remembers its own columns, its own sort and its own icon, in a small text file inside it, so if you move the folder, all of that moves with it.

Opening a Folder

Going In and Coming Out

Double-click a folder, in a launcher pane or in another listing, and it opens in the View, the middle of the screen. The first tab is the folder's name, and resting the pointer on it shows the full path; the only other tab, for an ordinary folder, is View. On the bar:

• Back and Ahead work as a browser's do. Back first retraces the folders you browsed into, and after that goes to the document you had open before. Hold either down, or right-click it, and the whole trail unfolds as a list.
• Up goes to the folder this one is in. It's grayed at a drive's root.
• Refresh is on the View menu, and F5 does the same. You rarely need it: the listing notices changes in the folder, from Desktop Minder or from anywhere else, and brings itself up to date about half a second after the last one.

A folder keeps its place. Go in, wander off, and come back by Back, Ahead or Up, and the same row is at the top, the same rows are selected, and the same one has the focus. A folder gone into afresh starts at the top. A folder on another computer is read on a thread of its own, with a wait cursor, so a dead share can't freeze the screen; if it can't be read, you're told.

The Line at the Foot

With nothing selected, the strip at the foot of the window says what's in the folder—"169 items, 3 hidden, 1,234 GB available space"—and with something selected, "4 of 169 selected." An empty folder says "This folder is empty" across its listing.

Folders That Are More Than Folders

Some folders open as what they are, not as a listing. A video or an audio project is a folder, but opens as the film or recording it makes. A scanned music library opens as a library, and a book of contacts as a table. A mailbox is a folder shown with its baskets—Inbox, Sent, Spam and the rest—as tabs along the top; the Email pages are about that. If you want to see inside one of these as the folder it really is, Shift and double-click it, or choose Open Launcher.

Looking at It

How It's Drawn

The View menu on the bar offers five layouts, one ticked:

• List Details, rows with columns, which is where a folder starts;
• List, names only, running down and then across;
• Extra Large Icons, Large Icons and Medium Icons, with the real pictures Windows would draw for them: a photograph's own thumbnail, an album's cover, a film's first frame in a strip of film.

Below those are three ticks: Show Hidden, for files with the Hidden attribute (and the folder's own settings file, which is otherwise kept out of sight); Show Extensions, for this folder, so that Sunset.jpg reads Sunset; and Hide Watched Videos, which leaves out the films you've watched to the end. Right-click on an empty place in the listing and the same choices are under View and Show, along with Paste. A folder with no choice of its own follows the Settings sheet's Show extensions box.

Columns

Right-click a column heading to see the columns on offer. Every folder offers Type, Size, Modified, Created, Attributes and Owner, and then a heading for each kind of file that is actually in the folder:

Click a column to show it or hide it. Drag the edge of a heading to change its width; the width is saved a moment after you let go. The columns sit in a fixed order. The point of offering only what's relevant is that Explorer's menu of three hundred columns, nearly all of them meaningless for what you're looking at, is nobody's idea of help.

Sorting

The Sort menu offers None, Name, every column that's showing, Ascending and Descending. Clicking a column's heading does the same, and clicking the sorted heading flips the direction. Name and Type start ascending; Size and Modified start with the biggest or newest. Folders always sit before files. None is a custom order, described below.

Selecting

Click to select a row; Ctrl+click to add or take away one; Shift+click for a range; Ctrl+A for everything. Drag a rubber band from an empty part of the Name cell, or from the space under the rows, to sweep up a group. (While you're typing a name or a cell, Ctrl+A is the text box's.)

It Remembers

The layout, sort, hidden and extension choices, which columns are showing, and their widths are all kept in a small hidden text file inside the folder, Desktop.dmini. It's written only when there is something to remember, and removed when there isn't. Because it's in the folder, moving the folder moves its memory with it, and if the folder is in OneDrive the same listing waits for you on your other computer. A folder that can't be written to, such as one in Program Files, says once that it can't remember anything and will look the way you left it only until you leave.

Making a New One

Choose Document > New on the folder's bar. At the top is Folder; below that, the documents that can start out empty: Audio, Text (Plain, Rich and Full), Video and Word Document. (In a mailbox's Outbox there's Email, and in the Mail folder, Mailbox.) The new item gets a name made of its kind and the moment—Folder_261025_143015, Text-261025-143015.txt—is selected, and has its name open for typing at once: type, press Enter, and it's named; Escape keeps the made-up name. New files are empty, and none of them is opened, since you may be making several. A name that's taken gets a number added. The kinds are described on the pages for text, audio and video.

Document > Create Shortcuts offers Web Site..., which asks for a name and an address and makes an .url shortcut, and Program..., which lets you pick an .exe and makes a shortcut to it named for the program's own description, wearing its icon. Right-click a program and Create Shortcut puts one beside it.

Changing a Folder

Rename

Right-click and choose Rename, or click the name of a row that's already the only one selected, and the name opens in place. With extensions shown, only the part before the extension is selected, so typing keeps the kind; with them hidden, what you type gets the old extension put back. Enter keeps the new name, Escape drops it, and clicking away keeps it. A name with characters a file can't have, or one that's already taken, is refused with a word about why.

Delete

The trash can on the bar, the Delete key and Delete on the menu do the same thing. On a drive that has a Recycle Bin, nothing is asked: the items go to the bin and the strip at the foot says so. On a network or removable drive there is no bin, so you're asked first, with No the default—"This cannot be undone." The trash can is gray unless something deletable is selected. (In a mailbox's Spam basket it's lit with nothing selected, and then deletes every message there.) The Recycle Bin is the only undo there is.

Cut, Copy and Paste

Cut, Copy and Paste are on the right-click menu and the Document menu, and they use Windows' own clipboard, so you can cut in Explorer and paste here. Copy as Path puts the quoted path on the clipboard. Paste takes more than files: text becomes a new .txt file named PastedText- and the moment, and a picture becomes a PNG, named PastedImage- and the moment.

Drag and Drop

Drag rows out with the left button. Drop on a subfolder row, which lights up, and they go into it; drop anywhere else in the listing and they go into the folder you're looking at. Files dragged in from Explorer, or from any pane, follow the same rules. What happens depends on the keys, and on one rule that holds whatever the drives:

The one exception is a program: if everything you drag is a program, or a shortcut to one, a plain drag makes a shortcut, because nobody has ever wanted to move Word.exe onto their desktop. Before you let go, the pointer says whether the drop will be taken, and why not if it won't: "Already in this folder," "Name can't be put inside itself," or that the folder belongs to Windows. Copy into the folder a file is already in, by Ctrl and drag or Copy and Paste, and you get a duplicate named Report (copy 1).docx, then (copy 2), and a copy of a copy is another copy of the first.

Copies, moves and deletes go in one queue, one at a time, so that two copies don't fight for the disk and both go at half speed. The strip at the foot of the window shows "Copying 2 of 5 to Photos: name.jpg" with a progress bar; click it for a window of everything waiting, with a Cancel. When Windows has a question, such as which of two files to keep, the strip says it's waiting for you.

Typing Tags in the Listing

In List Details, select a track or a film on its own, then click one of its cells again—a slow second click, not a double-click. The cell becomes a text box. Type, and press Enter to write it into the file, or Escape to leave it. Clicking away writes it too. Five columns can be written this way, for music and for films: #, Title, Artist, Album and Album Artist. The track number must be a number. The rest of a track's tags are on Edit Tags, described under Audio.

A Custom Order

Choose Sort > None and the rows stay where you drag them: pick up a file and drop it between two others, with a line to show where it lands. Folders stay first, and the order is saved in the folder. Drop selected files squarely on a file row while a sort is on, and the listing switches to None, with the rows as they stand, and moves them. An album's tracks are numbered in this order by Set Track Numbers.

Numbering Files

Select some files, folders or both and choose Normalize > Filename..., and they're renamed in the order shown with a number in front, in one of six styles: 1., 01., 1), 01), A) or [01]. It carries on from the numbered item just above your selection, in that item's style, or in the one chosen on the Settings sheet's Numbering files choice ([01] until you choose). Numbers are padded as far as the last one needs, and neighbors numbered the same way are brought to the same width, so the names still sort. It always shows what will happen first—each name now, and what it becomes—and it's all or nothing: a clash refuses the whole job, and Escape puts everything back. (Music and films have their own Normalize > Filename, which renames from tags.)

Compress and Uncompress

Right-click a .zip, .tar, .tar.gz, .tgz, .gz, .7z or .rar and choose Uncompress: it comes out into a new folder named for the archive, beside it, never over anything; an archive that is one folder comes out as that folder. Right-click a folder and choose Compress, and you get a .zip of it. Both check every file afterward, and by default put the original in the Recycle Bin once the new one is sound; hold Ctrl as you choose to keep it, or turn that off on the Settings sheet. On a drive with no Recycle Bin, it asks whether to delete the original for good, with Keep the default. The progress is on the strip at the foot, the window waits, and Esc stops it and takes away what it had made.

A Picture for the Folder

Right-click a folder and choose Choose Icon.... Add any picture, or drop one on the window, and it's turned into a proper icon and kept inside the folder, so the folder keeps its picture when you move it, share it or sync it. (In Explorer it's right-click, Properties, Customize, Change Icon, find a .ico, OK, OK—and the icon vanishes when the folder is copied.)

Properties

Choose Properties and the right-hand strip's Properties panel describes the folder: what it contains, folders and files, whether it has an icon of its own, and whether it has settings of its own. Show in File Explorer opens Explorer on it, for the few things only Explorer does.

Protected Folders

The Windows folder, Program Files, Program Files (x86) and Desktop Minder's own folder, and everything inside them, can be looked at and copied from, but not changed. Cut, Delete and Rename are left off the menus, New and Paste aren't offered, drops are refused with a word of explanation, and the trash can stays gray. That holds for an administrator too. The shared General desktop can only be changed by one.

Not Yet

• A search or filter box in a folder listing. (A music library has one.)
• Open with, and the entries other programs add to Explorer's menu—7-Zip and the like. The menu is Desktop Minder's own. Hosting Explorer's means several hundred lines of code whose failure mode is a crash, and I haven't thought it worth the price.
• Keyboard shortcuts for Cut, Copy and Paste in the listing, and Enter to open; for now use the menu, the right button, and double-click. F5, Delete and Ctrl+A work.
• Dragging columns into a new order, or grouping rows.
• Compressing to anything but a .zip.