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Submission details

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Customize/Folder view: Apply to all - how to make it working?

Submitted by damiankrol on June 5, 2008 to Aesthetics, Annoyance, Bug, Usability

That's one of the most annoying thing in (probably all versions of) Windows - how on Earth could I set ONE template (e.g. sort by, list view) to ALL folders? None of existing options work - even if you set it manually, it changes spontaneously in a few hours/days. That makes me really mad.

Please try to provide one dialog for every folders which will allow user to set the behavior of how folders are/should be displayed. And forget it then. Thanks.

High

High

Not fixed

Discussion (12 comments)

eried wrote on June 7, 2008, 7:28am

And apply to folders should contains more options or something, exceptions, etc!

cosmin2007 wrote on June 7, 2008, 4:23pm

good note, eried !

teraforce wrote on June 8, 2008, 2:03am

agreed

DoctorHouse wrote on June 8, 2008, 6:17am

promoted. this needs to be fixed.

Mikee99 wrote on June 8, 2008, 2:08pm

Very annoying indeed! +1

damiankrol wrote on June 8, 2008, 8:31pm

Changed problem description.
Changed solution description.

harryka wrote on June 9, 2008, 2:39pm

A really annoying thing! Good posting! I hope that this pain will have an end on day! :)

rus.newman wrote on June 10, 2008, 6:55pm

This has been driving me mad for years! Vista (and XP) seem to change my folder views sporadically, even when a template is set. +1 indeed!

dunion wrote on June 12, 2008, 3:35pm

XP mostly saved what settings I set and didn't change them much, though it is possible after some updates they got reset.

Vista has added the ability to show more thing like 'rating' and 'album'. I'd like that dialog to be expanded to handle all the new features, and *let me turn them off*. I don't, for example, ever want to be able to see 'rating' or 'album' or many of the new columns. So there should be a tab page to let me select which ones NEVER to show, which ones 'ALWAYS' to show, etc.

Basically this folder widget hasn't kept up with the explorer application it's trying to configure.

And 'apply to all' does appear to be broken.

Turning off the 'remember each folder's settings' so that for a given session all folders look like how you set it currently also appears completely disabled or broken.

I can say "apply to all" and browse several folders and it will in fact pick some other setting. I think on this dialog the user should be able to set the start folder (so it's not in 'my documents') and also the behavior (start where you were last time as an option, for example), and have these work.

zoran wrote on June 13, 2008, 5:47am

Hear hear. This is extremely annoying.
I came to hate the "Artist, Album, Genre, Ratings" columns now...
When it shows it in C:\Program Files for example, sometimes I want to edit a file there and put "Microsoft" as artist, "Vista" as album, "Punk/destroy" as genre and 0 stars.

Pharaoh wrote on October 5, 2008, 11:09pm

I've never had much of this problem with my system. ONLY time I've noticed it to change is when I've rebooted into safemode to do certain things and then back. Upon normal boot, then these settings have changed.

I wonder how many people are doing something like that similar, booting into safemode and then back and then complaining of that feature? Otherwise, hm. Seems odd it wouldn't remember.

rubber gun wrote on October 21, 2008, 4:53am

Heck, this whole List view thing is outdated. All these old legacy dialog boxes insist on showing EVERYTHING at you once. Steal from IE, and make Tabs, grouping, People will love you, microsoft.

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