One thing that everyone has problems with when you stop using explorer as your shell is that when it's not running as shell, it refuses to behave properly as File Manager. That is, it pops up errors when you try to RUN a drive or folder ... or refuses to browse in one window, constantly popping up new windows whenever you double-click a folder.
Anyway, if you're having problems with your filemanager, maybe it's time to fire it too (along with your shell), and get a new one!
Some of the best Filemanagers out there are free ...
There are some tricks to setting up an alternate file manager
If you don't like messing around in the registry, you're probably not using geoshell, and you should probably stick to Powerdesk as far as alternate FileManagers go, because it's the only one I know of that set's itself up as your default manager.
Other wise, you'll have to manage the transition yourself by changing the "associations" for your file manager. Now, the first thing you need to know is that there are THREE things involved: Drives, Folders and Directories (Windows sometimes uses "File Folder" instead of Directory .. but the real question we all have is : how the heck is a Directory not the same thing as a Folder?)
You can generally choose the default manager for each of these in the "File Types" tab of your "Folder Options" control panel (which is strangely only accessible from the Tools menu of the Explorer file manager). However, you may have to make a little hack to the registry key first.
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You could really mess up your PC by changing these settings. Particularly if you set them incorrectly, or later uninstalled that file manager.
For the sake of you mental health: Backup your settings first, or even better, do a full registry backup, or set a System Restore point. |
The "EditFlags" property in each of those keys is what keeps you from being able to edit them in that control panel, so we need to change that flag. I don't know what the correct set of flags would be ... but after much experimentation, 02 seems to do the trick – this should be the sole flag set, so JUST: 02, NOT: 00 00 00 02 (you'll see what I mean when you go to edit it). You have to make changes to all three Registry keys to get this right:
Once you've changed the flag to 02, you should be able to do the rest of your changes in the "Folder Options" dialog.
One thing to note: what you want to do is create a NEW action – do not EVER delete or change the "Explore" or "Open" options that are there already, make a copy and edit that if you want to change things – then just set whichever one you want as the default (for all three types).
A side note is that if you DO want to just use explorer, you can get rid of most of you problems by copying the "explore" action to a new "explorer" option, and leaving out all the DDE stuff. However, if you choose to do that, you'll have to remember to only navigate by clicking folders in the left "tree-view" pane, not in the right "list" pane (which would open a new window).
Stupid Explorer Tricks
If you start messing around in here, you soon start seeing things you don't understand, explorer has a few command-line switches (that aren't really documented except meagerly on MSDN in Q152457
) and there are also some neat variables that windows uses in the registry to indicate what to pass to a program ...
Explorer Commandline Switches are on a seperate page now, but the variables will stay here for now, because you will need to use them with your other file managers as well:
- %1
The "safe" shortpath (ie: C:\progra~1 instead of C:\Program Files)
- ;%L
is its long path ;%I is a unique ID - as far as I know, only Explorer and PowerDesk can handle these, and only if you put /IDLIST in as a flag.
You can also use any environment variables by putting percent signs on each side of them like: %SystemRoot% or %ProgramFiles% or even %USERPROFILE% or %ALLUSERSPROFILE% (on 2k, anyway) ... just keep in mind that not all environment variables exist on all computers ... and if you put environment variables into the File Types actions, it will do the replacement immediately (meaning it seems to permanently use the current value of the variable, rather than putting the variable in, which can't be a good thing for variables like %USERNAME% or %USERPROFILE%)
Now that I've explained how to do it the "right" way ... you CAN do this by modifying the registry ...
In each of the keys mentioned earlier ...
- [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell]
- [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell]
- [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell]
You will create a new subkey for your favorite filemanager, and then another called command inside that. The (default) value of command will be what you want to send as the command.
e.g., for explorer it is %SystemRoot%\Explorer.exe /E,"%1"
(The %SystemRoot% is an environment variable which gets replaced with the path to c:\windows\system or c:\winnt\system32 ... or whatever.)
Next, you just set the "default" value of each of the keys listed above to the name of the key you created for your filemanager.
That's basically it. We've created a sample registry file, the one for xplorer2 is fairly simple, with no command-line parameters except the actual folder.
(@= is the "default" String Value)
Download the sample for setting xplorer2 default, as a .reg file
. ... note that you must edit this file to make sure it specifies the correct path to your file manager.
Actually, the explorer one uses %SystemRoot% and also contains the DDE information Explorer likes so much, so that one should be okay no matter what, but you should be able to edit the 2xExplorer file to set your favorite filemanager up, no problem!
For further help and discussion, visit the Geoshell Board
