You can technically get a new window by launching a new instance of the app, but it takes as long to open as Windows 10's Explorer. Plus you get a nagging shareware screen ;)
I want to say "close but no cigar", but this thing isn't even on the right planet...
You could say its a matter of getting used to given tool - but consistently when I watch colleagues doing similar tasks, I am so much faster, easily 2-10x depending on task. And thats folks with 20+ years of experience. Yet whenever I try to show my ways to others, nobody picks it up. Its like some mental blind spot, people generally are happy to learn more effective ways for their work, but not this one.
Other things similarly take a while, like registering an update made elsewhere. These can be quite arbitrary, sometimes pretty instant, sometimes taking many seconds, and sometimes not updating at all until I explicitly refresh. I've even copied a small file to the same directory and waited several seconds before it showed up.
> Did you try to reinstall Windows?
For no sane desktop/similar operating system should “completely reinstall” be an off-hand answer for any but a massively significant error…
Windows 9x was a strange beast, being a VM running on top of a DOS hypervisor, but it was mostly C and inline assembly and felt fast, even with 8MB of memory and a 75MHz processor. Windows 2000 was quite less efficient and would have taken eight times the memory and twice the processor speed to achieve the same responsiveness. Even more with XP.
Nowadays Windows, the mere operating system, feels slow even on computers as powerful as datacenters of the 90s. Twenty five years of abstraction layers, subsystems, processes and libraries adding up, and it's getting worse (W11 vs W10).
It definitely won't run as fast as a VM on a modern host with a much more powerful CPU, significantly faster IO (especially if the VM is hosted on an SSD).
Also, once you hit the point where the guest OS can't cache as much as it wants (as you've allocated a realistic amount of RAM from time) the host layer may be caching reads at least in the extra memory it has.
[though I do get the point: if it can be as fast as it was on old kit, why can't Win10/Win11 be faster on modern kit]
https://github.com/Microsoft/winfile/
Edit: Also available on the microsoft store https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9p7vbbbc49rb?ocid=badge
Oh the horror... :)
My preferred UI:
Location bar Sidebar (file tree) | File List
Would be nice if each feature you don't need could be removed from the purchase price. I think the version I want would end up having a negative price tag ;)
Obviously running Windows in a VM will be slower, but besides, Explorer is more than just the file manager.
It used to be very easy to replace the shell (Explorer.exe) with your own binary, but while this is now harder in later Windows versions it is still doable. I loved to play around with that when I was younger, and before I got seriously into Linux.
Now, there is actually a few options:
- Aston Shell used to be my favorite, but it does not seem like it is actively developed anymore. It is also closed source, which is potentially a security concern.
- Classic Shell (Works for Windows 10)
- ExplorerPatcher (taskbar enhancements for Windows 11)
- StartIsAllBack (taskbar enhancements for Windows 11)
I do not recommend replacing the default file manager, because Explorer is already extremely good. If this is slow for you, most likely something else is causing it to be slow. E.g. Waiting for a external/internal storage device to respond perhaps?
Now, talk about Finder on Mac – while not slow, its UI is truly horrendous compared to Explorer on Windows or file managers in Linux.
If your system is slow, then keep in mind that a lot of things are going on with later versions of Windows that can make the system slow. I hate the "blackbox" nature of it, but fact is, you probably have a bottleneck somewhere, possibly you are still using a mechanical hard disk and/or do not have enough RAM for things to load properly. Windows prefetch should help speed things up, given enough RAM, but if you have too little, then it actually might make it worse.
I remember fiddling a lot with Windows services, like prefetch, search indexing. Etc. Basically turning these off will make a slow system feel more responsive. And, of course, Windows update and Windows defender should also be turned off entirely on older systems, because they will constantly pest you with updates and slow the system down. With bloatware added from the computer's manufacturer this only gets worse. Everything unnecessary running in the background should be purged from the system.
Typically things open near instantly for me. But, keep in mind in a VM, things is just horrible slow. Probably even more so if you run Windows 10 from a Linux host OS – I have had a lot of problems with that, and eventually I just gave up, because it was not fast enough for me.
For Windows, it is much, much better to setup dual boot.
It might just run...
Interesting idea, I hadn't thought about ReactOS as a possible source of FOSS programs for windows - but why not? We run Gnu user land various places after all.
Curious about why it crashes. Did you build from source?
Or it could be because of the compatibility: XP's explorer doesn't run on 10, so we shouldn't expect its clone to run either! But I had to try :)
Still, considering it's open source and the closest thing what I do want, starting with this and stripping out the taskbar might get me a good result.
Same with MSPaint: just spent several days trying to get the leaked XP MSPaint to compile, to no avail. Looks like I'd have better luck starting with ReactOS's paint clone and modifying it so it's feature complete and has the original icons :)
PowerShell. It's builtin, uses little resources, is fast, has pattern globbing, autocompletion, and can be as efficient as using the coreutils on *nix.
Unfortunately nnn and Ranger don't work on Windows, and the WSL uses more resources than explorer so this workaround isn't resource efficient. Cygwin is very efficient and could be a better solution to run them, I haven't tried it.
edit: Looks like lf works on Windows: https://github.com/gokcehan/lf
The free version (discontinued but the last version is available) itself works great.
Whenever I run XP in a VM, I'm amazed that explorer windows not only open instantly, but fully drawn! In W10 it takes half a second to even respond, and then another half second while it draws the UI elements one by one.
If I move a folder, Sublime Text detects it instantly, but the same explorer window I used to move it takes several seconds to register the change it itself made...