File Explorer has been the face of Windows since 1995, and most of what it does, it has done the same way ever since. Some of those ways are wrong, and have been wrong for thirty years, and every one of them has annoyed me personally. This is the list, with what Desktop Minder does instead. None of it is clever. It's just what you'd do if you were allowed to start over.

Two Copies at Once Go at Half Speed

Start a big copy. A minute later, start another. Explorer runs both at once, so they fight over the disk and each takes twice as long—the total is no faster, and neither is finished when it would have been. Desktop Minder puts every copy, move and delete into one queue and runs them one at a time, the way FastCopy does. A strip along the bottom of the window shows what's running and what's waiting. The second one starts the moment the first is done, and both are finished sooner.

Whether a Drag Moves or Copies Depends on the Drive

Drag a file to a folder on the same drive and Explorer moves it. Drag it to a folder on another drive and Explorer copies it. Same gesture, two results, and the only way to know which you'll get is to know how your disks are partitioned. Desktop Minder has one rule: a plain drag copies. Always. The move with the least effort should be the least destructive. Hold Shift to move; hold Ctrl+Shift for a shortcut. A program dragged with no key held makes a shortcut, because that is what anyone dragging a program wanted.

One Dead Network Drive Freezes Everything

Leave one shortcut on your desktop pointing at a NAS that's switched off, and Explorer stops answering for a minute or more—because asking Windows whether a file exists on a machine that isn't there means waiting for the connection to fail, and Explorer asks on the very thread that draws the screen. Desktop Minder asks about anything on the network on a thread of its own, gives it a moment to answer, and if it doesn't, writes the machine down as unreachable for a minute and gets on with drawing. The shortcut shows up grayed. The moment the machine answers anything at all, it's forgiven.

The Columns Menu Lists Every Column Ever Invented

Right-click the column headings in a folder of photographs and Explorer offers Album artist, Bit rate, Episode number, Fax number and some three hundred others, in a list you have to scroll, nearly all of them meaningless for what you're looking at. Desktop Minder offers the handful every file has, plus whatever the kinds of file in this folder have to say: Width, Height and F-stop for photographs; Title, Artist and Length for music; nothing extra for a folder of neither. Each folder remembers its own choice.

Double-Click a Film and Some Other Program Starts

Explorer is a list of files. Everything else is somebody else's program, and double-clicking a film means waiting for VLC or Movies & TV to draw itself before you see a frame. In Desktop Minder the film plays, right there, the way a folder opens. The same goes for pictures, text, web shortcuts, mail and music. Only a file the program doesn't know is handed to Windows, exactly as Explorer would have.

A Broken Shortcut Is Offered for Deletion

Double-click a shortcut whose target has moved and Explorer says the item has been changed or moved, and asks whether you'd like to delete it. The shortcut is a name, a place on your desktop and an icon you chose, pointing at a drive that isn't plugged in today. It needs mending, not deleting. Desktop Minder opens it as a page about where it points, and lets you drop the thing on it, paste the new path, or go and find it.

Changing a Folder's Icon Is a Project

In Explorer: right-click, Properties, Customize tab, Change Icon, browse to a .ico file (a .png won't do), OK, OK. And the result is a desktop.ini pointing at a path on this machine, so the icon vanishes when the folder is copied anywhere else. In Desktop Minder you pick any picture, and it's turned into a proper icon and put inside the folder, so it goes wherever the folder goes.

The Right-Click Menu Is a Filing Cabinet

Explorer's context menu is forty entries long, half of them planted there by programs you installed years ago, headed by categories somebody made up. Desktop Minder's is headed by nouns you can see on the screen: the thing you pointed at, then the thing it's in, then the thing that's in. Everything the program can do to anything under the pointer is on it, a level down at most, under the name of the thing it would be done to.

Double-Clicking a .reg File Rewrites Your Registry

Silently, after one Yes. Desktop Minder shows it to you as the text file it is.

Mail Readers Load Tracking Pixels

Not Explorer's fault, but in the same spirit. Nearly every mass mailing carries a one-pixel picture whose address is unique to you, so that fetching it tells the sender the exact moment you opened their message, and from where. Most mail programs fetch it. Desktop Minder's mail shows a message in a sealed box that runs no script and fetches nothing remote until you ask.

In Fairness

There are things Explorer does that Desktop Minder doesn't yet. The third-party entries on the right-click menu—7-Zip, source control, Open with—aren't there, because hosting Explorer's menu means several hundred lines of code whose failure mode is a crash, and I haven't thought it worth the price of Rename and Copy as path. Properties is still Explorer's own dialog, because Windows will put it up in three lines and it's a perfectly good dialog. And any file the program hasn't learned yet goes to whatever Windows would have opened it with. That list shrinks as I go.