A troublesome question for xyplorer

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phoenixchl1018
Posts: 2
Joined: 20 Jul 2019 11:57

A troublesome question for xyplorer

Post by phoenixchl1018 »

I found that there may be many third softwares have hard links to explorer.exe, so opening folders is not by default with xyplorer, even if I use administrator privileges to set and modify the registry. But I also found that directory opus can open folders as the default manager in any case, because it is more special, it adopts a separate exe to take over the default behavior of opening folders! Hope that the new version of xyplorer can refer to it, so that third-party software can also be opened by default with xyplorer! Be deeply grateful! In addition, you can refer to the management mode of his tag set, feeling more practical and stable than xyplorer, there will be no confusion of tags. Thank you!
Last edited by bdeshi on 21 Jul 2019 19:42, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: cleaned up subject

phoenixchl1018
Posts: 2
Joined: 20 Jul 2019 11:57

Re: A troublesome question for xyplorer

Post by phoenixchl1018 »

Do some one have method, thanks a lot

jupe
Posts: 2757
Joined: 20 Oct 2017 21:14
Location: Win10 22H2 120dpi

Re: A troublesome question for xyplorer

Post by jupe »

You could try the following tweak if you wanted, it could possibly help with some apps depending on their implementation, but also might cause other minor issues when opening some control panel items or the like, it likely won't fix all your expected situations, but may be of some improvement for your use cases, and currently is the closest that XY can achieve natively.

Code: Select all

+ Re-added tweak ShellIncludeSpecialFolders (originally added v15.00.0106 - 
      2015-03-15 19:41, then removed v15.00.0109 - 2015-03-16 11:10).
      Set it to 1 to widen the range of "Configuration | Other | Shell 
      Integration | Default File Manager | XYplorer in shell context menu" and 
      "XYplorer is default file manager":
        ShellIncludeSpecialFolders=1
      Technically, if ShellIncludeSpecialFolders=1 then XYplorer is registered 
      in the "Folder" branch (in Windows registry), otherwise XYplorer is 
      registered in the "Directory" branch and the "Drive" branch.
      NOTE: If you want to try this tweak you should first disable XYplorer's 
      shell integration. So you do it in this order:
        1) Untick "XYplorer is default file manager" and "XYplorer in shell context menu".
        2) Turn ON or OFF the tweak.
        3) Retick "XYplorer is default file manager" and "XYplorer in shell context menu".
for instructions on how to tweak: https://www.xyplorer.com/faq-topic.php?id=tweak

aminomancer
Posts: 31
Joined: 26 May 2019 06:29

Re: A troublesome question for xyplorer

Post by aminomancer »

If you don't mind not using the immersive control panel and some other old shell integrated windows system programs, that ShellIncludeSpecialFolders works perfectly and opens the folders in question instantly.

If you do mind it, I found a user's AHK script while I was looking into the same thing. I can't find the thread anymore but I actually have the files still. The way it works is to watch for explorer windows and quickly close them and reopen the path in xyplorer. The potential problem is the same as ShellIncludeSpecialFolders. A lot of older (pre-UWP, basically) "programs" in windows are actually special shell folders that open in explorer and are just drawn with various extensions. So they are not programs but paths to folders, but xyplorer doesn't have the capability to display them. So you need to define exceptions for the script, which is something you can't do with the native xyplorer tweak.

The advantage of the native tweak is that it works instantly and is a much "cleaner" method, so you don't see an explorer window open then quickly close before the folder actually opens. The disadvantage is 1) you can't set any exceptions, and 2) it doesn't actually work for a lot of hard-coded explorer.exe links. As far as I could tell, there are basically 2 different classes of links that aren't redirected to xyplorer with the default shell integration option enabled. First is special shell folders which can have names like "WORKGROUPS" or names that are just GUIDs in brackets. These can be fixed with the native xyplorer tweak, but most of these special folders can't be displayed in xyplorer anyway. You'll just get a message that the view is empty or that access is denied. Second is normal folders, locations that xyplorer has no problem opening if you navigate to it through xyplorer or through a normal link, but which can potentially be hard-coded into other software. The tweak doesn't seem to fix any of these situations. The example I was trying to fix myself is "open in explorer" links in github desktop client. These are normal paths that I can open in xyplorer but which nonetheless open in explorer because the github client is stupid.

I have the AHK script in both exe format and ahk format. If you use the exe format you don't have to install AHK, but you can't easily edit a compiled script so you can't add exceptions. So you'd probably want to use the UTF-8 script. I wish I knew who made it so I could give credit. I was using it for a couple days but ultimately I gave up on it. It's kind of ugly because of the delay and the explorer windows still visibly opening for a moment. And more importantly it takes a really long time to add all the exceptions to every single shell folder that displays with a shell extension. They have to each be defined separately. You can check most of them using winaero tweaker's "shell folder shortcut" feature. Maybe all of them are listed in some microsoft documentation, or perhaps in a registry key.

I just got sick of it and sucked it up. This is a problem with all third-party file managers, and it's not THAT inconvenient to just double click something and open it in xyplorer. Plus if you tinker much with xyplorer sometimes you need to use explorer for its normal functions. So I don't really recommend it as a solution to this problem, but if it bothers you so much that you'd stop using xyplorer, it's definitely worth a try. I'll attach the exe and the ahk script to this post. The script contains all the exceptions I ended up adding. They're on line 10, after global $excludePaths.
xyplorer_redirect.7z
(306.53 KiB) Downloaded 84 times

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