#242 Desktop Sort Order - hierarchical

[wlsalomon]

I've been working with Win8 for several days, and truly, Classic Shell is only only reason not to go running back to XP until it goes End of Life.

I have noticed (as I intetionally missed out of Vista and Win7) that C:\Documents & Settings has been replaced by C:\Users. That itself is not a problem.

What is a problem is that in the XP days, that Desktop items in All Users would sort first before individual users. This very conveniently put the "core" items first, followed by the account owners item.

This appears to be missing in Win8, and I have no idea about previous versions (Vista & Win7).

From what I understand, C:\Users\Public\Desktop takes the place of C:\Docs & Settings\All Users\Desktop, but the "hierarchical" sorting disappeared. All Desktop items - Shortcuts, Folders, Files, etc. sort "literally" by item type (with Program Shortcuts buried in data files due to their .lnk extension, I suppose), or by name (again, buried in the files where the extension does not matter).

Is this something that has a Registry entry to enable, or is this functionality that could be restored by a Classic Shell "tweak"?

Or maybe there is no answer at all.

Thanks for your efforts!

[Ivo Beltchev]

Are you talking about the Desktop or Explorer? Any way, I don't recall those items being sorted separately in either place.

[wlsalomon]

Ivo -

I'm talking about Desktop.

In the enclosed screen-shot I've done the worst case scenario in XP, a mixture of Shortcuts and regular files in both C:\Docs & Settings\All Users\Desktop and C:\Docs & Settings\user_account\Desktop. Note the added red line the separates the two. This separation does not happen in Win8.

The example I've provided is "messy" - under normal circumstances I would not place regular files in All Users, so all I would have is Shortcuts.

This was the only way I could reasonably "reorganize" the Desktop "semi-intuitively" for All Users and individual users.

BTW - the jpg's for the individual folders in both XP and Win8, plus the Win8 desktop are available if you are interested - this window only allows attaching one.

Thanks

[xpclient]

As a substitute/alternative to this missing feature, may I suggest Stardocks' free 1.0 version of Stardock's Fences program which may be of help?: http://www.filehippo.com/download_fences/7835/ Even if it says Commercial Trial, the 1.01 version is free. It is excellent for desktop icon organization.