What does HackerNews think of winfile?

> Plenty of open source apps are abandoned. The maintainers get tired, too busy, or whatever.

Other people can pick up the baton. For example my window manager of choice is Window Maker which was abandoned for literally years (fortunately since the underlying tech doesn't change every other month, it still kept working) before someone else it picked it up and nowadays there are a few developers working on it.

> If it was open source, the odds are no one would care to take over maintenance (though they could) since it’s basically redundant at this point.

When Microsoft opensourced winfile[0] (the file manager from Win3.x/NT 3.x) some developers did flock to it (i personally even added a small feature to allow for multiple file masks which was merged), so i'm pretty sure the same would happen for an opensourced wordpad.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/winfile

I am glad someone noticed. :-) It is the File Manager icon. I have always liked this icon and the aesthetic of graphics made for Windows 3.x, even though my first Windows was 95 OSR2. Since File Manager and the icon are now free (https://github.com/microsoft/winfile), there is no copyright reason not to use it verbatim.

If you liked it, you may enjoy my page https://dbohdan.com/gui-games.

How far back do you want to go? Windows 3.0 file manager is now open source and readily available from Microsoft directly![1] I’ve personally found it a joy to use even on a modern OS like 10.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/winfile

Initial commit in this source tree is from January: https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/commit/ac14e2df10de7...

The major code dump followed alongside the open source announcement:

https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/commit/c13b8a099eea1...

Given the huge size of the Windows repository it probably wasn't worth the effort to recreate the deeper history of the code (and I'd assume probably would have taken a lot of scrubbing/redaction clean up to make everyone, especially the corporate lawyers, happy).

They don't seem inclined to open source the Win32 UI, but it could potentially happen. Maybe when it hits some anniversary like WINFILE.EXE did: https://github.com/microsoft/winfile

I thought so too, given that MS has already released the source of the original File Manager:

https://github.com/microsoft/winfile

...and it compiles to a nice small and fast ~300KB executable, in contrast to their open-sourced and significantly less efficient UWP calculator:

https://github.com/microsoft/calculator

I believe the old leaked Win2k source has much of the explorer.exe source, if you're really curious.