Desktop Minder is a work in progress but it's already become useful enough to me that I use it more than File Explorer. It's intended (eventually) to be a "shell", the User Interface that stands between you, the user, and the underlying operating system. It normally occupies the whole screen: the wallpaper, the icons, the folders, the thing that opens when you double-click a file. It can run as an ordinary program in a window (good for testing), or it can be registered as the Windows shell, in which case Explorer never starts at all and this is your computer.

The idea behind it is simple to say and surprisingly hard to find anywhere else: a computer should be about your documents, not your programs. You don't want to "run a video player"; you want to watch a film. You don't want to "open an email client"; you want to read a message. In Desktop Minder, every one of those things is a document, and opening a document just shows it to you, the way opening a folder shows you what's in it. There is no separate program to find, launch, wait for and then load the file into.

What's Wrong With File Explorer

Nothing, if what you want is a list of files. But that's all it is. Explorer shows you a folder and then hands off: double-click a photo and some other program comes up to show it; double-click a film and a third one does; double-click a shortcut whose target has moved and you get a box offering to delete it. Every file you own is a ticket to some application, and the application is the thing you actually use. The folder was just the lobby.

And Explorer has habits I've disliked for thirty years. Start a second copy while a first one is running and both go at half speed. Drag a file to another folder and whether it moves or copies depends on which drive the folder happens to be on. One shortcut to a network drive that's switched off, and the entire desktop freezes for a minute. The Details columns menu offers every column Windows has ever heard of, in a list you have to scroll, for a folder of photographs. I've written up the whole list, and what Desktop Minder does instead, on the What File Explorer Gets Wrong page.

Documents, Not Applications

The way most computers work is app-centric: you pick a program, the program opens a file, you work on it inside the program, and at the end the program "exports" something. The document is a by-product of the application.

Desktop Minder is document-centric, which turns that around. The document is the thing. It knows what can be done to it, and it offers those things wherever it happens to be—on the desktop, in a folder listing, open in the middle of the screen. A few examples:

• A folder opens in place, as a listing. The columns it offers depend on what's actually in it: a folder of music offers Length and Bit rate; a folder of photographs offers Width and Height; a folder of neither offers neither. Tags can be edited by typing right in the cell.
• A picture opens to be looked at. Click its Change tab and right-click a red pixel, and the menu is about that red: select everything like it, replace it, make it see-through. The same menu goes on to list the whole picture, then the file, then the folder it's in, each with its own commands—because pointing at a pixel is also pointing at all of those.
• A film opens and plays, the moment you open it. Close it and open it again next week, and it carries on from where you stopped.
• A mailbox is a folder. Its Inbox, Sent and Spam baskets are folders inside it, and every message is a file you can see, sort, drag and delete like any other file. Opening one reads it.
• A web page, saved as a shortcut, opens right there in the middle of the screen, with a Back button, like any other document.
• Even a desktop's own settings are a document: a sheet you open from the desktop's tab. Type a new name, press Enter, and it's on the tab at once. Nothing waits for an OK.

The Documents, Not Programs page goes through these in detail, along with the idea that holds the whole program together: every document is a collection of smaller documents, all the way down.

What You See

Across the top of the screen is a row of desktops—Home, Music, Photos, Projects, Internet and so on—each with its own wallpaper and its own set of files. Each is simply a folder beside your real Desktop folder, so there is nothing clever about it: Explorer, OneDrive and your backup program all see it as ordinary files, because that's what it is.

Down the left side of each desktop are its launcher panes: the apps, the folders and the files on it, plus This PC and the Recycle Bin. Down the right side are Properties, a Viewer for peeking at whatever's selected, the Jukebox for music, and whatever plug-ins you've switched on—Wikipedia and sticky Notes so far. The middle of the screen is the View: the one document that's open, with Back and Ahead arrows that work exactly as a browser's do. When nothing's open, the wallpaper shows through.

The Desktops and Panes page walks through all of it.

Where It Stands

Desktop Minder is a work in progress, and I use it every day, which are not contradictory statements. Folders, pictures, text, films, music, web shortcuts, mail, contacts and notes all open as documents. Files drag freely between every pane, every folder and File Explorer; dragging one kind of document into another is only beginning. The picture editor works, but is young; the video editor is designed, and the first of its eight stages built.

Each kind of document has a page of its own that says how far along it is, and what's next: Text, Images, Audio, Video, and Email, which has a section of its own because it's made of all the others.

There is no installer yet. When there is, it will be here, under the usual Unknown Publisher warning, and it will need 64-bit Windows 11 and nothing else. In the meantime these pages are a description of what it is meant to be, written mostly so that I don't lose sight of it.

What's Inside

Desktop Minder is written in VB.NET on .NET 10, on top of my own CilwaLib. Anything with real structure—HTML, a message, the source editor—is shown through WebView2, the browser engine that is already part of Windows 11. Films step through ffmpeg. Everything the program remembers about a folder is kept in a small text file in that folder, named Desktop.dmini, so moving a folder moves its memory with it.