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0 pointsexe342y ago0 comments

I remember until win98, you could run a program called fileman or something that looked like a win3.1 file browser. That was my idea of retro back then..

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Dalewyn2y ago· 2 in thread

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 and removed altogether in Vista. You can probably grab the binary from XP SP1 and run it in newer Windows versions, though.

exe34OP2y ago

Might have to see if it works on wine. The screenshot has the horrible aero window frame though.

fredoralive2y ago

It's a multiple documents interface program (where one main window contains subwindows), a UI style out of fashion since the early days of Windows 95 (IIRC it was Office 97 that switched Office apps from MDI to multiple main windows for example). For some reason Microsoft hasn't updated the theming for them since Windows Vista, probably because it's such a niche thing. Even on Vista / 7, they're stuck as Aero Basic windows, rather than the actually glass ones. The Windows Forms editor in Visual Studio also using those window borders, which shows how much MS cares about that compared to XAML dialect of the week.

The Aero Basic theme is particularly horrible though, I do wonder if that particularly unpleasant shade of cyan for the borders was picked to punish those who didn't activate Windows, or were to poor to afford Home Premium.

In the end it's one of those weird forgotten things, like the Windows 3.x colour picker dialogue that still lurks in a few places like Wordpad (although MS are "solving" that).

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