Tag: pane_window

Customize Your Shortcuts to Folders

April 30, 2007 by Jason

In Windows, you can create a shortcut to a folder (for example, by right-click and dragging the folder from the Windows Explorer onto the desktop and selecting “create shortcut here”). Then, when you double-click on the shortcut, Explorer opens back up and displays the contents of that folder. There are four default characteristics when this happens:

1. It will open a single pane window (no Explorer bar).
2. It will allow the user to navigate out of the folder (i.e. to the folder’s parent and beyond).
3. The default is for none of the items in a folder to yet be selected.
4. If there is already an open Explorer window displaying that folder, then the operating system will switch to that existing view, as opposed to opening a new one.
All of these behaviors can be customized.

The first step is to convert the shortcut target from implicitly invoking the Explorer to explicitly invoking it. If you examine the properties of a folder shortcut, as described above (right-click and select Properties), you’d see that the Target field is the name of the folder. Read More»