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, Music, Places, Photos, Projects, Videos and Web Development, each with a wallpaper to match. You can add your own, rename any of them, and give each a different picture. 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.

Under the hood, there is nothing to it. Your real Desktop folder is Home; the others are folders beside it, named Desktop (Music), Desktop (Photos) and so on. 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 starts out with your bookmarks, gathered from every browser on the machine—Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera—with no address twice, as shortcuts in the folders you'd already sorted them into. Social has your contacts file and a Mail folder to keep mailboxes in. Home has Set Up Email, the one icon that has to exist before a mailbox can.

The Left Strip: Launchers

Down the left side of every desktop is a strip of tabs, each opening a launcher pane. The first three—Apps, Folders and Files—are this desktop's folder shown three ways, so the programs aren't mixed in with the documents. Each pane is a wall of icons you can sort, resize, and view as big tiles, a list, or a list with a preview of each file's first lines. Drag something from one pane to another and nothing moves on disk; the folder just remembers which pane you want it in.

After those come This PC, with every drive, and the Recycle Bin, which takes a drop as a delete. Home alone has a Settings pane: every page of the Windows Settings app, filed under its category, each with the same icon Settings itself draws. Drag one onto a desktop and you have a shortcut straight to that page.

Any folder can be put on the strip as a pane of its own—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 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, say—and a close button. Under the name is a thin bar with Back and Ahead arrows and whatever buttons the document itself needs.

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. The double arrow beside it, «, skips the steps inside a document—the pages of a web view, the folders of a listing—and goes straight to the document before. A document you put down isn't always thrown away, either: a web page you were logged into stays logged in, parked out of sight, and opening the same file again takes it up where it was.

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. The Viewer shows whatever is selected in any pane—a picture, a track playing, a film you can step through a frame at a time—without opening it, and Properties describes it. The Jukebox is the one music player, with its queue; every track, album and music folder anywhere in the program feeds it with Play Now, Play Next and Play Last.

After the built-in panels come the plug-ins you've switched on. A plug-in is a single file dropped into a folder, and so far there are two. 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 is sticky notes: a pane of text files, each tile showing its first few lines, with New Note at the top.

Along the Bottom

The clock in the footer opens a calendar. Beside it, when a copy or move is running, a strip 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.

Icons

Any picture can be put on any folder or shortcut: right-click, 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.

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.

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. The close button, which as a window just closes, as the shell offers the choice it has to—sign out, restart, shut down—since ending the shell ends your session. The registration is per user, so another account on the same machine still gets Explorer, and so do you, if you ever want it back.