Windows gives you one desktop, and everything you own ends up on it, in a heap. Desktop Minder gives you several—a row of tabs across the top of the screen—and each one is a folder, with its own wallpaper and its own apps, folders and files down the left side. You switch between them the way you switch between tabs in a browser.

The Desktops

A fresh installation offers Home, Internet, Social, Shopping, Music, Places, Pictures, Projects, Videos and My Web Sites, each with a wallpaper to match. At the left end of the row is a badge with your name on it, which does nothing when clicked; at the right end is the + tab. Click a tab to switch to that desktop, and drag a tab sideways to put the desktops in a different order. The strips along the top and down both sides wear the color of a Windows title bar, your accent color made paler, and change the way a title bar does when another program comes to the front. The Settings sheet has a Colors section if you'd rather choose them yourself.

Where a Desktop Lives

Under the hood, there is nothing to it. Your real Desktop folder is Home. Music, Pictures and Videos are your Windows folders of those names, wherever you've put them. The others are folders beside your Desktop folder—Bookmarks, PIM, Shopping, Projects, Websites—in your OneDrive if that's where you keep things. That means File Explorer sees them, OneDrive syncs them, your backup program backs them up, and if you ever stop using Desktop Minder, every file is exactly where you'd expect to find it. All the program adds is a small text file in each desktop's folder, Desktop.dmini, holding its wallpaper, how its panes are set out, and what was left open on it, plus a short list in the registry of which desktops there are. The file is in the folder on purpose: if the folder is in OneDrive, the desktop looks the same on your other machine, instead of having to be set up twice.

A few desktops come with something in them. Internet asks which browsers to gather your bookmarks from—Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera—and puts them, with no address twice, as shortcuts in the folders you'd already sorted them into. Social is your PIM folder: a Mail folder to keep mailboxes in, a book of Contacts, and your Calendars, plus Web Mail, Web Calendars and Web Contacts folders of shortcuts to Gmail, Outlook.com, Google Calendar and the rest, for the services you'd rather use in a browser. Home has Set Up Email, the one icon that has to exist before a mailbox can.

Adding a Desktop

The + tab opens a New Desktop page in the View. Pick a Title from the list (or type your own); the page fills in a Description, the Desktop Folder it would use, and a Background, and you can change the folder (Browse) and the background before you press Create. The background can be one of the pictures that come with the program, a picture of your own, a plain color, or none. A title that's already in use is refused. A desktop you've closed is on the same list, and choosing it brings it back as you left it. The Delete button beside the list forgets a desktop you no longer want offered.

There's a quicker way when the desktop should be a folder you already have: right-click the folder, anywhere in the program, and choose Create Desktop. The folder gives the desktop its name.

The Tab Menu

Right-click a desktop's tab for its menu:

• Rename opens the name on the tab for editing; Enter keeps it. Clicking the tab of the desktop you're already on does the same. Home keeps its name, so for Home this is grayed.
• Close Desktop puts the desktop away but keeps it as it is: the tab goes and what it had open is closed, but its folder and its Desktop.dmini stay, and the + page offers it again, laid out as you left it. It asks nothing, because nothing is lost.
• Delete Desktop forgets it. It asks first, then takes the tab off, takes the desktop off the + page's list, and removes the layout kept in its folder, so a desktop made on that folder again starts fresh. The folder and every file in it are left alone.
• Desktop Settings... opens this desktop's settings sheet, below.
• Desktop Minder Settings... opens the program's own settings, which hold for every desktop.

Home can't be closed or deleted, and neither can the last desktop that's left. Closing or deleting a desktop you're not on leaves you where you are; closing the one you're on takes you to Home.

A Desktop's Settings

A desktop's settings are a page of their own, opened from its tab: its name, its folder, its wallpaper, and which tabs are showing on either side. Nothing waits for an OK. The sheet also has Delete This Desktop..., which does what the tab's Delete Desktop does. The program's own settings are a tile called Desktop Minder Settings in This PC, as well as on the tab menu.

The Left Strip: Launchers

Down the left side of every desktop is a strip of tabs, each opening a launcher pane, a wall of icons that slides out over the wallpaper. The strip belongs to the desktop: each has its own tabs, in its own order. The first three—Documents, Folders and Apps—are this desktop's folder shown three ways, so the programs aren't mixed in with the documents. Drag something from one of those panes to another and nothing moves on disk; the folder just remembers which pane you want it in. Dragging a file over a tab opens that pane under it, so you can drop it inside.

The Standard Tabs

After those come File Cabinet, Pictures, Videos and Music, which are the Windows folders of those names; This PC, with every drive (and how full each is) and the Desktop Minder Settings tile; General, the desktop everyone who uses this computer shares; and the Recycle Bin, which takes a drop as a delete. Downloads, PIM, Soundfonts and Windows Settings—every page of the Windows Settings app, filed under its category, each with the same icon Settings itself draws—are there too, once you switch them on. Right-click the strip, or a tab on it, for the list of Standard Tabs with a tick where each is showing; the desktop's settings sheet has the same list. Tabs can also be dragged into a different order, and the strip can be made wider or narrower by dragging its edge.

The Panes Are Folders

Right-click a pane's background for its View menu: big, medium or small icons, a List, a list with a preview of each file's first lines, or a Tree, where a folder opens in place, right in the pane, the way Explorer's navigation pane does. The same menu has Sort, Show Hidden, Extensions and Refresh (F5). The icon views snap the pane to a whole number of columns of tiles, so there's never half an icon showing. And any folder can be put on the strip as a pane of its own—choose Open Launcher, or Shift double-click it in a listing—so the three or four folders you live in are one click away on the desktop they belong to. The Launchers page has all of it.

The Middle: the View

The middle of the screen is the View, where the one open document sits. Its name is on a tab at the top; beside that are tabs for what the document can do—Look and Change for a picture, Read and Edit for text, Watch for a film, Listen for a recording—or, for a collection, for the parts it's made of: a mailbox's baskets, a contact book's baskets, a music library's Artist, Genre and Album. At the far end is a close button. Under the name is a thin bar with Back, Ahead and Up arrows and whatever buttons the document itself needs. Each desktop has one View today. The program is built to hold two side by side, but there's no way to ask for a second yet.

Back, Ahead and Up

Back and Ahead work the way a browser's do, across everything: back out of the folder you browsed into, then back to the picture you were looking at before that, then back to the web page before that. Hold Back down and the whole trail unfolds as a list. Open a picture from a folder's listing and Ahead goes on to the next picture in it, like a slide show. Up goes up: to the folder an item was opened from, or, from a web page, to the document you had open before it.

What Closing Does

A document you leave isn't always thrown away: a web page you were logged into stays logged in, parked out of sight, and going Back takes it up where it was. Close one with its X, though, and it's let go of entirely. A picture, film or recording you've changed on a drive that has no Recycle Bin asks whether to save before you leave it. When nothing is open, the wallpaper shows through. That's deliberate. A desktop with nothing going on should look like a desktop.

The Right Strip: Panels

Down the right side is a second strip of slide-outs, shared by every desktop: which are open, how wide, and in what order carries from one desktop to the next. Click a tab to slide its panel out and again to put it away, and drag a tab to move it. Right-click the strip, or any tab on it, for the list of Side Tabs with a tick where each is showing, and untick what you don't want; the same list is on a desktop's settings sheet. Dragging the strip's edge sets how wide the panels are. The Panels page goes through opening, sizing and ordering them in detail, and the Settings page covers the lists and ticks that decide which are showing.

Properties

Properties describes whatever is selected in any pane, or open in the View, and some of what it describes can be edited there. It follows whatever you clicked last. These are the facts behind the scenes of a file (its size, its dates, what it's made of), where tags are the things you choose to say about it.

The Jukebox

The Jukebox is the one music player, with its queue; every track, album and music folder anywhere in the program feeds it: right-click and choose Play, then Now, Next or Last. The Audio page says more.

Wikipedia

After the built-in panels come the plug-ins you've switched on (the Settings sheet has the list), and a few panels that borrow a program of their own. Wikipedia is a small browser that goes nowhere but Wikipedia, remembers the topics you've looked up, and comes back to the article you were reading; any article can be popped out into the View as a document of its own.

Notes

Notes is sticky notes: a pane of text files, each tile showing its first few lines, with New Note at the top. Open a note and it's a text document, because it is one.

Calculator

Calculator is Windows' own Calculator, sitting in the strip, with all its modes. The strip opens wide enough for the mode you've chosen. It closes with Desktop Minder.

Claude

Claude is the Claude app, the real one, in the strip. The arrow beside its name opens it in the View when you want more room. There's only ever one copy: if Claude is already running, that's the window that's used, with your conversations in it; if not, Desktop Minder starts it. It needs at least 616 pixels of width, so the strip opens that wide for it; where there's not that much room, Claude steps out into a window of its own and says why. When Desktop Minder closes, Claude is given back as it was found and left running. If you quit Claude from its own menu, it isn't started again behind your back; the pane offers a button to start it.

Along the Bottom

The Clock and Calendar

The footer's clock shows the date and time (the date drops out when the window is narrow). Click it and your calendar opens in the View. The Calendar page is about using it.

The Status Strip

The band to the left of the clock says what's going on. When a copy or move is running, it shows what's being copied and what's waiting its turn—because, unlike Explorer, Desktop Minder runs one file operation at a time, so neither of two copies has to go at half speed. It also reports a mail check under way, and a OneDrive-only file being fetched. Point at a link in a web page or a message and it says where the link goes. With nothing else to say, it tells you how many items are in the folder you're looking at, how many of them are hidden, and how much room is left on its drive, or, once you select something, how many of the items are selected.

About and Exit

About and Exit sit at the right, just left of the slide-outs' strip. About shows the program's version, which is the date it was built. Exit closes Desktop Minder: it first asks about anything unsaved, waits for a copy that's running to finish (or asks whether to leave the ones waiting behind it), and writes down where everything was. Run as the Windows shell, Exit is a power menu instead; see the last section.

Icons

Any picture can be put on any folder or shortcut: right-click, choose Choose Icon..., pick the picture, done. A folder carries its icon inside itself, so it keeps its picture when you move it, share it or sync it to another machine. Your icon library lives in OneDrive, for the same reason: a shortcut points at its icon by path, and OneDrive is the one place that has the same path on every machine you sign into. A shortcut to a web site that has an icon in your library by its name—YouTube.ico, Amazon.ico—wears it without being told.

Themes

The pictures the program draws for its own things—your mailboxes and their baskets, the messages in them, the settings tile—come in sets called themes. The set that comes with Desktop Minder is called Gingerbread. Camping is the first other one, drawn in the style of a trail map and a pocket knife, and I'm having more made. Here are the folders of a mailbox, in each:

Theme	Mailbox	Inbox	Outbox	Sent	Drafts	Unknown Senders	Newsletters	Spam
Gingerbread
Camping

Each of those is a role, and every theme answers to the same ones, which is what lets one stand in for another: the Mailbox is the account itself, Inbox is mail arriving, Outbox mail waiting to go, Sent mail that's gone, Drafts unfinished writing, Unknown Senders the strangers' basket, Newsletters the subscriptions, and Spam the tin. A theme can also give a picture to a single Message, a Newsletter issue, and a Slice—one piece of spam, because one piece of junk mail wouldn't look like junk—and to the PIM, Mail, Contacts and Calendars folders and the Desktop Minder Settings tile.

What a Theme Can Do

• Change those pictures, wherever they're drawn: on a tile, in a listing, on a tab. The change is instant. The pictures are drawn inside the program, at whatever size is wanted, so nothing is written into your mailboxes or folders, and File Explorer shows what it always did.
• Start the desktop's colors. A theme may name the colors in the Settings sheet's Colors section. Choosing the theme sets them, as a starting point: change one afterward and it stays changed.
• Leave things out. A theme that has no picture for a role gets the Gingerbread one for it. And your own picture beats the theme: an icon of the same name in your icon library is used first, then the theme's, then the one that came with the program. Brand pictures—YouTube, Amazon, Set Up Email—aren't themed at all, and are the same in every theme.

Choosing One

Open the Settings sheet, from This PC, and pick from the Theme box at the top. Themes come from plug-ins, so a theme has to be switched on in the plug-ins list below it first, where it's marked as a theme; there's no restart needed for a theme, though there is for any other kind of plug-in.

Making One

A theme is a folder of icons, a picture for each role, named for it: Mailbox.ico, Inbox.ico and so on (or Rainbows-Mailbox.ico, if the folder is called Rainbows; the name of the folder and the dash are ignored). One 256-pixel frame in each is enough. You can add a small settings file, Theme.dmini, naming the theme and giving its colors. Then right-click the folder, choose Convert to > Icon Library, and Move to Desktop Minder plug-ins on the result. What you get is one file holding the whole theme, which holds no code and can't run anything.

Not Yet

• Wallpapers and fonts as part of a theme. Backgrounds belong to each desktop for now.
• Pictures for the kinds of document themselves—a film, a score, a track with no cover—and for the buttons.
• A way to see which roles a theme has left out.

As a Window, or As the Shell

Desktop Minder can run two ways. As an ordinary program it's a window, with a title bar and the usual three buttons, and Escape brings a full-screen window back to a size you can see around. That's how to try it. Only one copy runs at a time: start a second, and the first comes forward.

Registered as the Windows shell, it replaces Explorer entirely: no taskbar, no Start menu, no desktop icons but its own. It fills the screen with no border, because a title bar on the desktop would be something to minimize the desktop by, which means nothing. Exit, which as a window just closes, becomes a power menu as the shell, since ending the shell ends your session: Switch to Explorer (first, and deliberately, so there is always a way back to an ordinary desktop), Screenshot, Lock, Sign Out, Restart and Shut Down. Where Windows' own ways of taking a picture of the screen are Explorer's, Print Screen takes one of the whole screen and Alt+Print Screen of the window in front; it goes into Pictures\Screenshots and onto the clipboard.

The registration is per user, so another account on the same computer still gets Explorer, and so do you, if you ever want it back. It's two ticks on the Settings sheet: Start with Windows, and then Make Desktop Minder the Windows shell, which can't be ticked until the first is. Nothing about installing the program does either of them. The change takes effect the next time you sign in.

Windows' own Settings app won't start without Explorer, so when Desktop Minder is the shell, a page of Windows Settings opens its older Control Panel equivalent where there is one (sound, mouse, date and time, region and so on), and says so where there isn't. If anything misbehaves, Switch to Explorer on the Exit menu hands the screen back without signing you out, and uninstalling Desktop Minder takes back the shell registration, so Windows is never left starting a program that's gone.