It's not about creating new filesystems, but using filesystem ui to browse any filesystem like hierarchy. For example using a potential implementation you as a user could be browsing S3, remote NFS, or gmail account where labels would be represented as folders and emails as text files.

Powershell providers get you quite the way there, though of course only PS understands them so they're not useful for other applications.

> gmail account where labels would be represented as folders and emails as text files.

Okay, this sounds incredible - is this an actual doable thing here?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GmailFS.

This was a big deal when gmail was first announced and they said they would give away one gigabyte (!!) worth of email storage with every (free!) account.

These days, dropbox, drive and many other similar services provide a much more straightforward mapping to a storage service.

You don't. Where this comes in as useful is when you have a dual boot system, and you want to access your ext3 filesystems from Windows, for example. It would also be useful for running FUSE ZFS, since ZFS can protect data in ways which are science fiction for NTFS.

Or BTRFS or EXT4 or XFS or etc...

On any case NTFS feels a lot outdate against any other FS, plus It helps a lot to the people (like me) that works half time on Linux, half time on Windows. Instead of keep the shared data on NTFS, I could dream of using BTRFs and keep a time machine like system using snapshots....

Btrfs isn't there yet in terms of stability and who knows if it ever will be with current implementation. Ext4 doest have snapshots or data integrity as ZFS..

Sorry I don't want to nitpick but just in case someone is considering it.. Do your research about filesystem first. ZFS has no equal at this time.

BTRFS is in a perpetual beta because the developer(s) haven't been able to iron out all the bugs. Not even the filesystem format has stabilized yet.

(Open)ZFS, on the other hand, has ten years of enterprise production use under its belt. And versioned filesystem and feature flags, so the latest OpenZFS can read all its previous versions (and ignore unknown feature flags) without breaking backward compatibility. Like the other commenter stated, it has no equal right now. Closest thing to ZFS, conceptually, is the Oracle automatic storage management (ASM). While ASM is available on Windows, ZFS is not, but FUSE might actually let you run it. Might.

EncFS, sshfs, ext3, on the fly Amazon Drive, Google Drive reading etc. etc.

You don't. Dokany allows a user-mode application to expose its own virtual drive.

Examples of possible use cases:

- Mount a zip file as a drive letter

- Mount an ftp site as a drive letter

- Mount an Android device as a drive letter

In all the above cases, there's ways to view zip files, ftp sites, and Android devices in Explorer; but you can not open these files in any application you want unless they are copied to a local disk.

My fave project using FUSE: https://khenriks.github.io/mp3fs/

Just for kicks I just ported mp3fs to Cygwin using WinFsp and Cygfuse. It is getting to dinner time and I have to be with the family, but I will post more on this in a day or two.

Ok, after this Pull Request is merged into Cygfuse, anyone will be able to compile MP3FS on Cygwin.

https://github.com/mgeisert/cygfuse/pull/2