I think for the purpose of this discussion, explorer IS Windows. It is the UI that we all wish didn’t have these issues. I like using the command line / powershell when I’m on Windows for large file operations, but sometimes I still go to drag files around out of habit and quickly remember I have made a huge mistake as everything grinds to a halt / takes forever. On Linux and MacOS GUI file operations most of the time seem like they are just a visual way to call the same operations you’d be using on the command line.

My habit is shift+del for windows; but most of the time I use cygwin anyways.

>I think for the purpose of this discussion, explorer IS Windows.

The article is about the file system, not the UI.

This is true, but I don't understand why Explorer has been plagued with performance issues (and some of those intermittent; I presume based on network status) since forever.

I'm actually a big fan of Windows on the desktop, and as long as I avoid Explorer, I have no issues at all with file system performance while I'm developing, working from the command line, VS Code and Rider, and working with containers and WSL - all works great. But Explorer is such a central component of Windows that it affects pretty all users. I genuinely don't understand how it can be so rubbish ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sometimes it's some .dll extensions which get loaded into explorer.exe which cause these problems.

I once had a PDF file on the desktop and for some reason this file was causing explorer.exe to freeze under certain circumstances. It's all a big mistery.

> It's all a big mistery.

Such is the nature of closed source black box software.

So true, I really have to say Explorer sucks. Recently I've been bothered by an issue that it tries to fully read every ts file, like maybe it's trying to read a Typescript file, but in my recent cases they are usually streamed video files of several GBs... It just never gives up and use my disk usage at 100%, I just have to kill explorer.exe everytime. I even tried messing with Registry about ts file but that's no good.

And even its Item Handler system is flawed. Still about .ts, it could stutter when I open context menu on ts files, then freeze forever if I hover over just 1 bit on "Open with" menu.

What about refusing to delete files that some process has open in a dangling descriptor? Is that just a GUI thing? I'm pretty sure it isn't.

Also, is there a better way to hunt down the background process than sysinternals? It seems pretty ridiculous that a low level debugging tool is required to do something as modest as reliably move and delete files, but I never heard of a better workaround.

LockHunter is a nice right-click utility for this

You just outed yourself as a "power user". ;)

>What about refusing to delete files that some process has open in a dangling descriptor?

This is how it is on Windows. Linux handles open file deletion a lot better.