Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for?

Re:Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for? by TeMPOraL on Sunday July 05, 2015 @08:27AM (#9833312)

You could refresh any folder in Explorer, not just your desktop. It's not just about Active Desktop 'michaelt mentioned (which had a refresh, but I guess it was a different refresh, coming from IE and not explorer.exe), but - as 'UnoriginalGuy hinted - because Explorer could, and often did, go out of sync for various reasons. It didn't affect only networked drives, it happened equally well when you had enough many files in a folder (something must have been timing out) or your computer was overloaded. The most common case I recall - Explorer didn't automatically show files created by other programs, sometimes it didn't even show a folder or a file you created via context menu.

Actually, I'm pretty sure some of this still happens today, in particular I remember noticing on Vista/Win7 that Explorer sometimes doesn't immediately refresh the folder contents when there's a new file created by external application (e.g. a log file), and refresh/F5 is useful to get this file visible immediately.

Funny thing, per the phenomenon of operant conditioning, over the years of using Windows I learned to regularly refresh Explorer windows via F5 to ensure I always see what's really there, sometimes just for my own peace of mind.

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Re:Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for? by moberemk on Sunday July 05, 2015 @09:59AM (#9833572)

An example of this: One thing that Windows versions up to at least 7 have always had issues with is that when you rename a file to be the same name with a slightly different case, say after changing an uppercase letter to a lowercase one, Explorer doesn't seem to pick up on the change until a refresh is manually triggered.

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Re:Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for? by TeMPOraL on Sunday July 05, 2015 @10:06AM (#9833594)

Oh, and here I always thought it just doesn't rename the file at all. NTFS is case-sensitive but Explorer is only case-preserving, so I thought it was just assuming I typed in the same name. When I wanted to change the case of a file name, I always renamed the file first to something else, eg. "Foo.txt" => "bar.txt" => "foo.txt". Thanks for the information :).

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Re:Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for? by arthulia on Sunday July 05, 2015 @01:51PM (#9834256)

NTFS is case aware, but not really case sensitive.

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Re:Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for? by therein on Sunday July 05, 2015 @04:25PM (#9834779)

How does that work? Did they implement case sensitivity and then decided to not use it?

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Re:Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for? by rys on Sunday July 05, 2015 @08:33PM (#9835895)

It's more the case that NTFS is case-sensitive, but the Win32 APIs aren't.

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Re:Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for? by userbinator on Sunday July 05, 2015 @10:30AM (#9833670)

The most common use I have of the refresh feature is to observe the sizes of output files (e.g. logs) from a process to see their growth.

If you have a process that creates a file and then writes e.g. several KB to it every few seconds, without doing anything you'll just see the file created with a size of 0. Eventually it does move from 0 but if you want to see the current size you need to refresh.

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Re:Ask HN: What was the Windows “refresh” button for? by ipp on Sunday July 05, 2015 @11:37AM (#9833853)

I've still run into these quirks on 8.1, particularly when deleting files outside of the Desktop itself (e.g. through other programs/command line, maybe Explorer).

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