winfile VS yori

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

yori

Malcolm Smith's YEdit deserves mention here, also inspired by the old MS-DOS Edit which was used by so many people in yesteryears to edit their autoexec files, read .nfo files and poke into the numerous batch files of the day. MS-DOS Edit no longer runs natively outside of something like a DOSBox, but YEdit is the closest thing I have seen to recreating almost exactingly the old nostalgic experience.

Tilde is of course more for the non-Windows audience while YEdit is only for Windows.

http://www.malsmith.net/edit/

MIT licensed source: https://github.com/malxau/yori/tree/master/edit

Escaping of arguments and slashes in paths will now hopefully work better on Windows, which is generally an issue there. Yori shell is now also handled on Windows.

If you're not constrained to inbox tools, there's a lot more out there. Personally I'm not a fan of PowerShell and have posted all of my tools at https://github.com/malxau/yori . Not saying that's an exhaustive set of tools that solves all problems, but it's my list of "what's missing" from the out of box Win32 experience.

For what it's worth, I maintain my own CMD-like shell (http://www.malsmith.net/yori) and look in forums like this for suggestions/feature requests. I see why you'd like this, but if implemented, it can't ever be consistent, so I worry that it'd just generate more confusion.

A start menu/taskbar (stop laughing - I'm not crazy!) It's a 52Kb self contained executable that can parse shortcuts from the start menu folders. Makes RDP to Core into a somewhat sane experience. See https://github.com/malxau/yori/tree/master/yui .

Thankfully, the author of Yori[0] shell has made a modern port of EDIT called, well, Yedit[1].

[0]: http://www.malsmith.net/yori/

[1]: https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2021/03/03/yedit-the-miss...