Microsoft to Remove ‘Legacy Options’ From Windows 11 File Explorer

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https://www.extremetech.com/computing/microsoft-to-remove-legacy-options-from-windows-11-file-explorer

Uh-oh…

The full list of options that are being removed includes the following:

• Hide Folder Merge conflict.
• Always show icons, never thumbnails.
• Display file icon on thumbnails.
• Display file type information on Folder tips.
• Hide protected OS files.
• Show drive letters.
• Show popup description for Folder and Desktop items.
• Show encrypted or compressed NTFS files in color.
• Use sharing wizard.

“Microsoft says its research shows people just aren’t using these anymore…” No drive letters, really!?! Without them, Windows would become unusable for me. Do they propose to replace it with a Linux drive naming scheme, like sda1 instead of C:\ ?

Microsoft says that it will be possible to re-enable these options via Registry changes. Fantastic–instead of 478 customizations to make Windows 11 tolerable, it’ll now be like 485 things to fix.

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Apparently Winaero tweaker has a little utility that restores these changes to Win11 should you wish and other “goodies” beside all gloriously free, one of my Faves over the years.

Any way why remove them in the first place? especially if they still work and dont cause any problems. It makes no sense, but thats MS for you I suppose, some things they just dont seem to be in a hurry to fix, and others they seem to be overly hasty to get rid of.

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windbg

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Unfortunately, neither that article nor any other I’ve read about these changes say anything about what the default settings will be after the options are removed. Nor is it said if your current settings are preserved or reset.

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Don’t worry will be giving feedback.

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Cybertooth wrote:

No drive letters, really!?! Without them, Windows would become unusable for me.

My guess is that they intend to identify each volume by its label, rather than by the drive letter and the label. This, sadly, fits in well with the recent software development fad wherein giving the user less useful information is somehow seen as a good thing. The justification is that extra info makes it look more complicated and scary and might intimidate new users.

My answer to this is for the new users to push through the discomfort and learn what the things mean, at which point they are not complete newbies anymore, and they will be able to begin to benefit from the no-longer-scary things that give them useful info (as they will continue to do for the rest of their time using that UI). To redesign an entire UI schema around that fleeting moment when someone is a true newbie who knows nothing, at the expense of usability for all the years afterward when the person is not a newbie, boggles my mind, but this very thing has been a much criticized factor in Apple GUIs as well as GNOME in Linux-land. I guess MS wants to follow the crowd once again and make the same bad decisions everyone else is making.

Do they propose to replace it with a Linux drive naming scheme, like sda1 instead of C:\ ?

Those names are not exactly like drive letters, though they do serve a similar purpose.

In Linux, each drive will have a designation like sda, sdb, sdc, etc,. for “SCSI” drives, which includes SATA drives. NVME drives will get a name like nvme0n1 for the first (physical) drive, nvme1n1 for the second, and so on.

Each logical volume (partition) on any physical drive will get a number, like the 1 in sda1 for the first one, sda2 for the second, and so on. ‘sda’ means the physical drive as a whole, while ‘sda3’ means the third partition on the physical drive ‘sda’.

For NVME drives, a ‘p’ is added to the drive name, and the logical volume number comes after that, so the first partition on the first (or only) NVME drive in a given system would be nvme0n1p1. The p is necessary to separate the 1 at the end of nvme0n1 from the partition number. Otherwise, it would be impossible to distinguish the first partition of the first NVME drive from the 11th NVME drive.

Each of these drive names would be listed in /dev, the Linux list of all the current system devices. While we can call a drive ‘sda’ for convenience, when addressing the drive or volume in the OS, it will always be /dev/sda or /dev/sda1 (and so on).

Even though the drives have those names, you can’t just open a terminal window (akin to a command window) and select a drive for navigation (folder/filesystem browsing) by typing its name. You also can’t cd into the /dev/sda folder and browse it from there… it won’t work.

If you want to make the directory tree in the sda1 volume available for use, you mount it to the existing directory tree. There are several ways to do this, including by means of the GUI, but the command line way would be to type something like

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

which would mount the whole directory tree in nvme0n1 at /mnt. You can pick anywhere you want on the directory tree. After the volume is mounted,  you can seamlessly navigate from the root tree to the one on sda1, like it was not actually a separate drive.

You can do this kind of thing in Windows too, but it is not necessary, as you can just use drive letters, so a lot of people do it that way. In Linux, you have to mount the drive to the existing directory tree before it can be used.

Then there is Btrfs, which is another animal completely, and not one I am at all familiar with.

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Wrt “Microsoft says that it will be possible to re-enable these options via Registry changes”, Martin Brinkmann has some Registry changes in his article about this subject at  https://www.ghacks.net/2023/06/16/microsoft-is-removing-some-folder-options-in-windows-11/

 

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I presume they’re removing the option to disable the drive letters and leaving them on. Hiding the drive letters by default would be stupid. But then again, hiding protected OS files (really anything with the System attribute) behind a registry setting is also stupid and potentially dangerous.

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Cybertooth

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It’s okay, guys! You’ll know which one is C: because it will be called Local Disk, while all additional drives will be called New Volume. There’s no need to tell apart the latter regardless of how many you have – just use Windows Search to find your stuff!

/sarcasm

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Insider build 23486 released today to Dev Channel has reverted these changes.

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A commenter near the end reports that a new-style Windows 11 File Explorer is available with the following command:

C:\Windows\explorer.exe shell:AppsFolder\c5e2524a-ea46-4f67-841f-6a9465d9d515_cw5n1h2txyewy!App

I tried it with cmd.exe and got the following result:

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I used the “Run” command. File Explorer has taken a step backward.

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geekdom wrote:

I used the “Run” command. File Explorer has taken a step backward.

You stepped backward by six years.

Cybertooth wrote:

a new-style Windows 11 File Explorer is available with the following command:

That command is for an old-style Windows 10 File Explorer:

How to Enable the Modern File Explorer Shell in Windows 10

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geekdom

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File Explorer Current Information

For now, the following advanced settings are no longer available:

1. Always show icons, never thumbnails. (default off)
2. Display file icon on thumbnail. (default on)
3. Display file size information in folder tips. (default on)
4. Hide folder merge conflicts. (default on)
5. Hide protected operating system files (Recommended). (default on)
6. Show drive letters. (default on)
7. Show encrypted or compressed NTFS files in color. (default off)
8. Show pop-up description for folder and desktop items. (default on)
9. Use Sharing Wizard (Recommended). (default on)

These options are no longer listed ion Folder Options, but they can be changed using the Windows Registry.

Source:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/06/16/microsoft-is-removing-some-folder-options-in-windows-11/

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joep517 wrote:

This build reverts the changes made to the File Explorer view options.

Thank you to all the Windows Insiders who gave us feedback on the Folder Options changes in File Explorer that removed a handful of old settings in Build 23481. We’ve rolled back this change. As is normal for the Dev Channel, we will often try things out and get feedback and adjust based on the feedback we receive.

Announcing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 23486

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geekdom

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Are we back where we started? No error? No foul? No changes? No proposed changes? No panic? No impending doom?

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Seems so. Microsoft always listens to feedback and takes quick action. 😁

(Why is each year’s intake of interns more hare-brained than the last?)

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geekdom

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b wrote:

That command is for an old-style Windows 10 File Explorer: How to Enable the Modern File Explorer Shell in Windows 10

From the description in that post:

One of the last holdouts in the transition from classic app to the new modern look and feel is  File Explorer. While the file manager has seen a number of new features over the years, it’s still based on the legacy win32.

What you are calling “an old-style Windows 10  File Explorer” may have been around since 2017, but it’s still based on the “Universal Windows Platform app” model, which is much newer than the classic Win32 application model. If the universal File Explorer is somehow “old style,” then comparatively speaking what is the Win32 File Explorer?

 

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Ancient.

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Would you agree that the UWP version of File Explorer is a “Modern” app?

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Yes:

b wrote:

How to Enable the Modern File Explorer Shell in Windows 10

What it’s not is “a new-style Windows 11 File Explorer”.

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b wrote:

What it’s not is “a new-style Windows 11 File Explorer”.

So, is there a version of File Explorer that is newer than the Modern one?

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Yes; the current Windows 11 File Manager has tabs and a streamlined context menu.

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Trying to cut through the thicket: By “new-style” File Explorer, I mean the UWP File Explorer whose emergence, it turns out, has been teased for a while but “remains hidden to normal users“. (I note that the author in the latter post suggests naming the manually created shortcut for it “New File Explorer”.)

One can quibble over whether this UWP File Explorer is new, technically speaking, if it’s actually been around since 2017. However, considering that it is hidden from the UI, then for all practical intents and purposes it will be new to the general public, if and when it is ever brought out into the open to replace the classic File Explorer as the default file manager.

 

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