Tag folders by right clicking with a cascaded context menu on Windows (XP, too)

[1] 1. Introduction

Note: A more step-by-step guide is to be found farther below, see point 5.!

Recently, [Umlüx] has reminded me of his idea to be able to (visually) tag folders on Windows for specific purposes. For convenience, it’s supposed to work by right-clicking a folder in Windows Explorer, opening a submenu from the context menu, and then by picking the proper tag. After that, the folder icon should change, indicating that something’s special about this one. Windows can actually do the “tagging” part by itself using desktop.ini files, but manually writing them is a pain of course, hence the right-click idea.

The thing is, there already are tools to address folder tagging on Windows, but they’re often not feature complete, have limited XP compatibility or they lack very important features like timestamp preservation. Others have that last part, but only in paid versions of their software. So, time to do it by ourselves!

I picked his Powershell code up, and while it would run on my ancient XP x64 machines, implementing the required menu structure proved to be impossible, especially the cascading part. Ah, let me just show you the final product first, so you know what it was that I wanted (in my case, it’s meant for tagging media folders):

2. Creating the menu structure (XP + Vista compatible)

Starting with Windows 7, Microsoft introduced a new way to create submenus in the context menu, including icons, all in the Windows Registry. Older versions of Windows like Vista or XP however can’t do that, and I wanted a solution that works on all of them, from XP to Win10. So how can programs like 7-zip create such Explorer submenus with icons on legacy systems? They do so by injecting a COM .dll into the graphical shell, extending its capabilities. Typically, those are written in C++, and that’s not something I want to or can even do.

Luckily, we don’t have to develop that by ourselves, as somebody has already done it: Meet the [KuShellExtension]!

KuShellExtension – or KuShellExt in short – is a set of two library files, KuShellExtension.dll as well as KuShellExtension64.dll, the latter being meant for 64-bit Vista machines. It’s compiled for NT 5.2 though, so it’ll also work on XP x64 and Server 2003 x64. On top of that, it still works even on Windows 10! With the libraries comes an XML configuration file and some simple installer/uninstaller shell scripts.

In the example we’ve seen in the screenshot above, the respective configuration in config.xml would look like this:

expand/collapse source code

As you can see, it defines the main menu with its icon and then several submenu entries with their own icons. Also, it’s not calling my modified version of Umlüx’ Powershell script, but a Visual Basic Script instead. The reason for this shall be explained in point 4., for now we only care about the menu structure.

Looking at the variables defined on top of the XML data, ICON_DIR and INSTALL_DIR, they reference an icon folder and a program folder, both in %APPDATA%\changeicon\, so I put that into the current users’ profile folder. The icons to be used have to be put into the ICON_DIR, the scripts and an unlocker program are to be put into INSTALL_DIR. That doesn’t affect KuShellExt itself though, you can install that anywhere.

Note that while KuShellExt is loaded, you can edit its configuration on the fly. The library will detect changes made to it, and reload the updated configuration automatically, so you don’t have to unload and load the .dll when making changes to the menus or icon names.

Now, we still need the scripts and [Unlocker 1.9.2] (this is just the .exe, without the adware that usually comes with version 1.9.2). As to why Unlocker is required, well, let’s talk about that and also give you the first script:

3. The timestamp issue and the Powershell script that does the tagging

Note: Windows XP or Vista users may have to install the Windows Management Framework Core package (including Powershell 2.0) first.

This whole solution will alter folder appearances by placing hidden desktop.ini files into them. Writing such a file will alter the folders’ modification time though, or in short it’s “mtime”. And that’s bad if you have software that relies on that piece of meta data. One typical example would be backup software, that decides whether files have to be backupped based on the mtime.

In my own case, the backup problem applies to my rsync backup system, but there’s even more; I’ve written myself a Perl script that walks through my entire video folder, generating an HTML report out of the data, sorted by “latest first”. That way, I can see what movies or series have been added or modified recently. That script also depends on the mtime, so having it change when tagging folders is not acceptable!

Time to look at Umlüx’ script, or rather my modified version of it, changeicon.ps1:

changeicon.ps1, expand/collapse source code

 

As you can see, the mtime is first being read from the folder by using $folder.LastWriteTime, and then reset to that value after writing the desktop.ini to the target directory. Also, it calls unlocker.exe /S on that folder to unlock it first, no matter whether there are open files within that folder or anything. This is done to avoid the dangerous situation, where the code would write the desktop.ini, but would then fail to update the folders’ timestamp due to open handles on the directory. Often this would also be caused by Windows Explorer itself, especially if you have open subfolders when tagging.

Forcefully unlocking the folder first deals with that problem. Please keep in mind that doing this may make programs relying on their open handles to behave in an undefined way however. Loss of data in that folder could be possible, e.g. if a text editor loses its handle for writing to a file in that folder.

In case something still goes wrong, the mtime is also being remarked in the desktop.ini file, in the value TimeStamp.

Here’s a sample .ini, as generated by changeicon, the format of the timestamp depends on your locale:

Now, there is one cosmetic issue left here…

4. Hiding that ugly terminal window

You can try to hide the window that pops up when calling a Powershell script, but it never really works reliably. So, are we going to tolerate that thing popping up every time we tag a folder? As if! That’s where the VBScript code comes in. This is an old trick I’ve used to run cmd batch scripts in a hidden way before, and this also works for calling Powershell scripts. I call this changeicon.vbs:

changeicon.vbs, expand/collapse source code

 

5. Actually running that Frankenstein solution

In essence, you need to do the following:

1. Pick a folder for changeicon.ps1, changeicon.vbs and unlocker.exe, and put those three files into it.
2. Pick a folder for your icons, and place all your desired icons into it, no subfolders!
3. Edit changeicon.ps1 and changeicon.vbs and change the install/icon paths.
4. Install KuShellExtension and run its DLL hook script install.cmd.
5. Edit KuShellExts’ settings.xml to reflect your menu structure and the corresponding menu icons and commands to execute. Better don’t delete all the comments in that file, the documentation can be pretty helpful at times.

Unfortunately I can’t share the icons I’ve created because they’re based on Microsofts’ icons, but you can easily find icons online or make your own with Microangelo or IcoFX. Both are commercial software for Windows, but you could also use the Gimp for that.

6. Enjoy tagging folders

With that, it’s much, much easier to keep track of things and to not forget what kind of stuff (*cough* tons of Anime *cough*) I still need to watch or keep an eye on for later.

But it’s not limited to that; You could use tagged folders for pretty much anything, like designating them to specific purposes or use them for document or work classification, whatever.

It’s interesting that even Windows 10 still can’t do that via the GUI by default by now…

Anyway, thanks fly out to [Umlüx] for writing the most important part at the core of this mess, the Powershell script, and also to [Idera] for the icon refreshing code I grabbed from their site! Also, if you want Umlüx’ modern solution for Windows 7+, which is based on pure Powershell code and Registry entries, you’d need to contact him directly. You may wish to do so, if you don’t need XP or Vista, because then you wouldn’t need to rely on the KuShellExtension anymore.

Happy tagging!

 

[1] Logo based on the Windows 10 Custom Folder Icons Pack made by Terraromaster

Tag folders by right clicking with a cascaded context menu on Windows (XP, too) © 2017 by The GAT at XIN.at is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.