Shell – Best Shell to Replace Windows Explorer for Better Folder Browsing

shell

I do know about the existence of alternative shells such as SharpE, Emerge Desktop, Ashton Shell, BB4Win, etc… I've looked into a few of those popular/famous ones, but they all seem to be very desktop-centric. That is, they transform how your desktop, task bar and start menu looks. But what I am really interested in is changing the actual "explorer" part of Explorer in Windows 7. That is, this:

screen shot of example

Those shells I named don't seem to do anything about that. (Or did I miss something??) Once I start opening folders, I'll still have to deal with the above-pictured Windows Explorer. Classic Shell is along the lines of what I'm looking for: it adds useful copy/paste, etc. icons, can remove the breadcrumbs, and even changes dialog boxes when overwriting files. That's good but not enough. Does anyone know of more powerful alternatives?

I've been suggested to try things like Total Commander. From what I understand, though, the problem with that is that I would specifically have to open that program in order to use it. That's not the same as shell replacement because if I were to open a folder on my desktop, I would still bring up Windows Explorer. Right? Ideally, I wish to be able to use my computer in the same way as the default way, but so that every time I browse folders and files, some alternative interface is what I deal with. Does anyone know of an alternative shell that provides that, better than Classic Shell does?

EDIT: I forgot to mention, I also get bugged by some small details of dialog box behavior in Windows 7. For example, if I am opening a file, I have to first click inside the file selection window before I can start scrolling using the mouse scroll wheel. It's one extra click but it's annoying. It doesn't make sense! And Windows XP didn't have this issue. Would any alternative shell also "fix" that??

Best Answer

You want an alternative file manager, also known as an Explorer replacement. Some of them will take over folder open operations, so that double clicking folders opens the file manager. e.g. Directory Opus and xplorer2 are two I know of that do this, there are probably others.

However, shell dialogs in programs (Open/Save) will still be driven by Explorer. It's really more accurate to say that Explorer is a relatively thin veneer over the shell's file management abilities. It also provides the Desktop and Taskbar, but the file management abilities mostly come from other components in the system. Explorer doesn't provide them to the rest of the system.

That's why they're so difficult to override; to heavily modify those components requires messing about very deep in Windows with ramifications for every non-trivial application. Especially since those DLLs get loaded into the memory space of those processes, screwing up a mod potentially destabilizes almost every user-facing application.

Related Solutions

Windows – Stop Windows 7 Explorer from automatically expanding folders

There is a way to do this, at least for the user's home directory:

open explorer
right click on the username (the user's expanded home-directory)
do not choose any item of the context menu, but left click on the little arrow to collapse this directory
exit explorer
open explorer and enjoy ;)

Bash shell: how to reconcile portable configuration files and GUI terminal start-up types (login or interactive)

The most common problem caused by misuse of shell startup files is that if you define environment variables in .bashrc as opposed to .profile, they are not defined in applications that are not launched from a shell in a terminal but rather from a GUI menu.

Defining environment variables from .bashrc is generally not a good idea, but that's primarily because it's generally useless as the variables should already have been set at login time. It can cause a problem in practice if you (or an application) have deliberately changed the value of a variable (e.g. PATH) in a program and you launch a shell from that program and expect the setting to have remained the same.

You can avoid the problem of environment variables being reset by defining a “sentinel” value, and not defining anything if the sentinel value is set:

if [ -z "$JMLANE_PROFILE_READ" ]; then
  export ...
  export JMLANE_PROFILE_READ=1
fi

Another problem caused by terminals starting login shells is that there are things that should only be done once when you log in, for example starting a password agent (e.g. ssh-agent), or initiating a session (e.g. running startx in certain circumstances). The sentinel variable avoids these issues.

A shell inside a terminal is always interactive. As long as you source .bashrc from .bash_profile when the shell is interactive, you don't need to worry about the terminal starting a login shell.

An additional wart of bash's startup file handling is that .bashrc is read by non-interactive shells invoked by rshd or sshd. For example, when you do rsync somefile host.example.com:, if your login shell on host.example.com is bash, you can use .bashrc there to set the path to include rsync. You can tell you're in this situation because .bashrc is read from a non-interactive shell.

## .bashrc
if [[ $- != *i* ]]; then
  # either .bashrc was executed explicitly or this is a noninteractive rsh/ssh session
fi

Best Answer

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Windows – Stop Windows 7 Explorer from automatically expanding folders

Bash shell: how to reconcile portable configuration files and GUI terminal start-up types (login or interactive)

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