old-new-win32api VS winfile

Do you have any recommendations?

I assume this is the one you’re talking about https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

I was curious, went to the end (page 699!) and it’s pretty interesting. But obviously it’s hard to find the important ones.

Not quite. DOS was just the bootloader for Windows 9x.

While Windows 95's kernel didn't have the full feature set of NT, it still was more sophisticated than DOS.

Source: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=24063

Some registry keys also have The Old New Thing posts by Raymond Chen [1] /s

[1] https://github.com/mity/old-new-win32api#registry

Lucky you, Raymond Chen did an overview in his blog series "Inside STL". You can view it here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

Yes, Raymond Chen describes such fixes in [several blog posts](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/) and in his book The Old New Thing. Check the old posts, back at the beginning. There are posts about to which lengths they went to ensure buggy applications still worked after an update or a fix.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/larryosterman/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

A couple of blogs as an example: - Raymond Chen - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ - Pavel Yosifovich - https://scorpiosoftware.net/ - Adam Sawicki - https://asawicki.info/index - Matt Pettineo - https://therealmjp.github.io/ - Scratchapixel - https://www.scratchapixel.com/

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

Ask and ye shall receive: https://github.com/Microsoft/winfile

File Manager, or winfile.exe, was the predecessor to Explorer's file management aspects. You can use it on Windows 10 and 11 (and all the others) if you want to.

Program Manager, or progman.exe, was the predecessor shell to Explorer. It was included with Windows through Windows XP SP1 before finally being stubbed in SP2. You can probably grab the binary from XP SP1 and run it in newer Windows versions, though.

> Plenty of open source apps are abandoned. The maintainers get tired, too busy, or whatever.

Other people can pick up the baton. For example my window manager of choice is Window Maker which was abandoned for literally years (fortunately since the underlying tech doesn't change every other month, it still kept working) before someone else it picked it up and nowadays there are a few developers working on it.

> If it was open source, the odds are no one would care to take over maintenance (though they could) since it’s basically redundant at this point.

When Microsoft opensourced winfile[0] (the file manager from Win3.x/NT 3.x) some developers did flock to it (i personally even added a small feature to allow for multiple file masks which was merged), so i'm pretty sure the same would happen for an opensourced wordpad.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/winfile

There's always winfile lol. I wish they'd drop the 95 era file explorer source. That was the best one imo.

The ancient winfile (that get revived by microsoft), ctrl+shift drag to make symlink.

Joke comment: WinFile if you do not have Windows 11 22H2.

Here's the WinFile link, enjoy :) - https://github.com/Microsoft/winfile/

Good old Windows File Manager from the early 90s! In the Microsoft Store or github https://github.com/microsoft/winfile