#148 Catigorically Group Programs

[Anonymous]

I find myself reorganizing the Programs folder every time I add or upgrade software. Primarily so that at least the Main Programs folder does not get very large, but then to also group programs into a Company or Categorical layout.

Some Examples:
1) Every Microsoft Product installed, creates a new shortcut folder in the root of the Programs folder. My preference is to move/relocate these into a Microsoft folder in the Programs Folder so that all Microsoft products are grouped by that Company name. Granted this is not really a "Category", but I would prefer to group by Company name, then potentially by Category, or possibly have the shortcuts duplicated if they truly need to be in two locations.
2) The Games folder I store under an Entertainment folder along with other entertainment type applications, Rhapsody, Pandora, etc.
3) Installing Utility type programs, such as the ClassicShell, I then relocate to a Utility folder in the Programs Folder, one, so that usually shows up at the bottom of the Programs folder. Now doing this may can cause the Utility folder to get fairly big, which is where organizing them by Category would come in handy.

I have been thinking about coding something up for a while, but seeing how awesome the ClassShell application is, I think this would be an excellent feature enhancement.

My first thought around this is Not to actually organize the contents of the Programs folder, but to organize it on the fly when programs are added/updated/uninstalled (Possibly using an Alternate Programs Folder). This way, the shortcuts remain in original location, so that installs/uninstalls will update/remove them correctly.

Second thought is having maybe a few variations on the catorgical ordering, since different people have different views on how to organize them, and have this stored online so that as new programs are added to peoples pc's, the online can be used to see how people group them, and can be downloaded or checked whenever new programs are added that are not in the current downloaded categorical parameter file.

[Ivo Beltchev]

You can use drag/drop to rearrange the shortcuts in the Programs menu. Classic Shell can't do this for you, as it doesn't know what organization you prefer. Somebody may want to place Word in Utilities, or in Text Editors, or in Microsoft.

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Maybe desktop.ini can help here. Using desktop.ini, you can make the shell show a different file name and folder/program group name without actually renaming the items to prevent breaking shortcut removal on uninstall. See the LocalizedFileNames and LocalizedResourceName sections at this link: http://hwiegman.home.xs4all.nl/desktopini.html . Classic Shell can build a GUI for this so for every installed program group and shortcut (.LNK) file, a "Rename" action adds a desktop.ini that does the work of adding LocalizedResourceName and LocalizedFileNames for that shortcut/program group.

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Actually this is really powerful and cool functionality built into the shell and already utilized in Vista/7 to display localized shortcut names and folder names in the Start Menu. See this example for 7-Zip: http://img853.imageshack.us/img853/8861/examplez.png. The command prompt shows the real names of the folder and its shortcuts whereas Explorer shows the names defined in desktop.ini !! Only thing is creating all the steps is laborious. First create a desktop.ini, then give it system+hidden attributes, then type the syntax for the sections and the filename of every shortcut or folder you want to rename. Classic Shell could create a simple GUI to automate this so the shortcut names and folder names are mapped to string values in desktop.ini and its attributes set automatically. This can be a MAJOR new feature in fact for Classic Shell 4.0.

[Ivo Beltchev]

If the goal is to simply give a user-defined name for folders and files in the classic start menu, then it can be done in a different way. The start menu can keep a list of name overrides in the registry without dealing with ini files.
However this is different from what is asked here - group programs by some user-defined criteria. What is a "program"? What is a "category"? How to determine the category of a program? These are all questions that I don't think have a good answer.