File Explorer and the Windows shell

File Explorer is probably the Windows tool you use most, and it’s been around in some form since Windows 95. So you already know it. But there’s more going on in there than a window full of folders, and some of what you see isn’t quite what it looks like.

To open it, select it on the taskbar or in Start, or press Win + E.

The parts of the window

Part	Where it is	What it does
Tabs	Top of the window	Your open tabs, and a button to add one
Toolbar	Beneath the tabs	Back, Forward, Up and Refresh, plus the address bar and search box
Address bar	In the toolbar	Shows where you are, and takes a path you type in
Search box	Right side of the toolbar	Searches the folder you’re in
Command bar	Below the toolbar	New, Cut, Copy, Paste, Rename, Share, Delete, Sort and View, with three dots at the end for the rest
Navigation pane	Left side	Your folders, drives and libraries
Content pane	Center	The files and folders themselves
Preview pane	Optional, on the right	A look at the selected file without opening it, Alt + P
Details pane	Optional, on the right	More about whatever you’ve selected, Alt + Shift + P
Status bar	Bottom	Item counts on the left, and two buttons on the right to switch between details and large icons

The preview and details panes share the same spot, so you get one at a time.

Home, Gallery and This PC

The top of the navigation pane is how you get around, and those entries aren’t all the same kind of thing.

Home is where File Explorer opens by default. It used to be called Quick access, until Windows 11 22H2 renamed it. On my test machine it shows your pinned folders at the top and three tabs below them, Recent, Favorites and Shared, so whatever you were just working on is close by.

Quick access still exists, now as your list of pinned folders. Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Music and Videos are pinned by default, and they show up on Home and in the navigation pane. To add your own, right-click a folder and select Pin to Quick access.

Gallery is your photo collection in one view, with the most recent ones at the top, no matter which folder they’re in. Microsoft added it in late 2023. It’s not a real folder, just a view of the folders you choose in its Collection dropdown, and it also shows up when a program asks you to pick a file. If you take photos on your phone and use OneDrive Camera Roll Backup, those land in there as well. Don’t confuse it with the Gallery in the Photos app, which is a different thing with the same name. Me? I always ignore it and have never used it, so much so that I actually missed it while writing this article. But if your photos are scattered all over the place, it might be for you.

This PC shows your drives under Devices and drives, and anything mapped from a network under Network locations. If you remember Documents and Pictures being listed here too: Microsoft moved them to Quick access in 22H2, to keep this view focused on drives.

Would you rather land on This PC than on Home? That’s a setting, and it’s in the next article.

Shortcuts worth learning first

Shortcut	What it does
Win + E	Open File Explorer
Ctrl + T	Open a new tab and switch to it
Ctrl + W	Close the active tab, or the window if it’s the only one
Alt + Left arrow	Back to the previous folder
Alt + Up arrow	Up one level
Ctrl + L or Alt + D	Jump to the address bar
Ctrl + E or Ctrl + F	Jump to the search box
Ctrl + Shift + N	Create a new folder
F2	Rename the selected item
Alt + Enter	Show properties of the selected item
Alt + P	Show or hide the preview pane
Alt + Shift + P	Show or hide the details pane

Moving and copying files (Drag&Drop)

Cut, Copy and Paste work the way you’d expect, and you can drag files around with the mouse too. Hold a key while you drop, and you decide what happens:

Hold while dropping	What happens
Nothing	Moves it on the same drive, but copies it to another drive
Ctrl	Creates a copy
Shift	Moves the file
Alt	Creates a shortcut to the original

Yes, a plain drag does two different things depending on where you drop it, so hold a key if it matters. I found no official page for any of this, so that table is what my test machine did.

A shortcut is a tiny file that only points to the original. My test file c-alt.txt came out as c-alt - Shortcut.lnk, and deleting it left the original alone.

The address bar

The bar at the top shows where you are, and you can click any part of the path to jump back there. Press Ctrl + L and it turns into plain text, so you can copy the path or type one in, like C:\Users\kmarflow\Documents.

Other things in the navigation pane

On a clean install, the rest of the pane is OneDrive right below Gallery, your pinned folders, and Network at the very bottom.

If you use OneDrive, those little status icons next to your files tell you where each file really is:

Icon	What it means	Works offline?
Blue cloud	Online-only: takes up no space on your PC	No
Green circle filled white, with a green tick	Locally available: it downloaded when you opened it, and Free up space turns it back to online-only	Yes
Green circle filled green, with a white tick	Always available: you chose Always keep on this device, so it stays on your PC	Yes, always

With Storage Sense on, Windows can also turn locally available files back to online-only after a while, so if something absolutely has to be there on the plane, make it the filled green one.

What a double-click actually does

Double-clicking a file doesn’t “run” it. Windows looks up what to do with that type of file. These file associations decide which app opens it, which icon it gets and what’s on its right-click menu. On my clean test machine, for example, a .bmp picture opens in Photos, not in Paint as you might expect. If you’d like a different app, right-click the file and select Open with.

Not everything in File Explorer is a folder

Open the Recycle Bin and it looks like any other folder. It isn’t, and it’s not the only one.

File Explorer shows you more than what’s on your disk. Windows puts your folders and drives together with other things into one big tree, which Microsoft calls the shell namespace, or in their words, a larger and more inclusive version of the file system. Anything in that tree that isn’t an ordinary folder on disk is a virtual folder. You browse it like any other folder, but you generally can’t create new ones yourself.

The word “shell” is the same one from the overview, by the way: the part of Windows you see and click on.

The Recycle Bin: one view of every drive

The Recycle Bin looks like one folder, but each drive has its own. What you see is all of them put together, which is why a file you deleted from D: shows up right next to one from C:. Microsoft’s programming documentation talks about “all Recycle Bins on all drives”, and lists the one you open as a virtual folder.

That has some practical sides:

• A deleted file doesn’t free up any space until you empty the bin. Microsoft reminds you of this too, when you’re trying to clear space.
• Windows may empty it for you. If Storage Sense is on, Microsoft says content in the bin gets deleted after some time.
• Each user gets their own view, so you won’t see what someone else on the PC has deleted.
• Delete sends the selected item to the bin. Shift + Delete deletes it permanently, with no stop along the way.

On my test machine, with a second drive and a second user, that’s exactly how it went. Files deleted from C: and T: showed up in one Recycle Bin, while each one really sat in a hidden $Recycle.Bin folder on its own drive, in a subfolder per user. A 200 MB file only freed up its space once I emptied the bin. The second user saw an empty bin and got access denied on my subfolder. Microsoft’s pages don’t describe that part, so it’s from this test.

Right-click the bin and select Properties to set a maximum size for each drive, or to skip the bin on that drive altogether.

Your desktop: two folders pretending to be one

The desktop looks like a place of its own, but it’s a folder. Actually two: your own at %USERPROFILE%\Desktop, and one shared by everyone on the PC at %PUBLIC%\Desktop. Windows shows both as if they were one, which explains the classic “why can’t I delete this shortcut without an admin prompt?” It’s in the shared one. On my test machine, a file in either folder showed up on the desktop, but changing the shared folder without administrator rights was refused. It’s also a hidden folder, so you won’t spot it unless you show hidden items.

Libraries: one view of several folders

The Recycle Bin works a lot like the next one, although Windows treats them as different things.

Libraries are the exception you can make yourself. A library looks like a folder but holds nothing. It’s a view that shows the contents of several folders together, on your PC or on another storage location. A bit like a playlist: the songs aren’t in it, it only knows where they are. So if your photos are in two places, a Pictures library can show them as one.

Windows comes with four: Documents, Music, Pictures and Videos. Each includes your normal folder of the same name, and saving a file to the library puts it in that folder.

Two things to keep in mind:

• Adding a folder to a library doesn’t move or copy anything. The files stay right where they are.
• What you do in a library still happens to the real files. Delete a file there, and you’ve deleted the file itself, not a copy.

Libraries are hidden by default. To show them, open File Explorer’s options, select the View tab, then Show libraries. The next article shows you where those options are. Or just enter shell:Libraries in the address bar.

I tried both of those points on my test machine, with a test library holding folders from two drives. Both folders showed up as one, a file I copied in landed in the library’s save location, and deleting a file from the library deleted the real one, off to the Recycle Bin.

Why a stuck Explorer takes your taskbar along

The program behind File Explorer is explorer.exe, and Windows also starts that same program as your shell when you sign in. So your folder windows and your desktop and taskbar are close relatives, which is why a stuck File Explorer can feel like all of Windows has frozen, and why your taskbar sometimes just ghosts you.

Your taskbar pins and Start menu entries are also just files in folders, which fits the theme of this section:

What	Where
Your taskbar pins	%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar
Your Start menu entries	%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs
Start menu entries for all users	%ProgramData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs

On my test machine there was one explorer.exe running, with or without a folder window open. When I froze it, the folder windows, the desktop and the taskbar all stopped responding together. When I crashed it, all of them vanished, and Explorer came back by itself within a second or so. Don’t count on that though: on my own PC it used to stay gone, and I couldn’t work out what changed. Task Manager gets it going again.

The nice part is that you can usually fix this without restarting your PC.

When it stops responding: restart Explorer

1. Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to open Task Manager.
2. On the Processes page, select Windows Explorer. Typing explorer in the search box at the top is the quickest way to find it.
3. Select Restart task, at the top of the window.

Your desktop and taskbar disappear for a moment and come back. Open folder windows don’t: I had one open before the restart, and none after, so you’ll have to find your way back there.

Task Manager gets its own article later: Task Manager, processes and startup apps.

If it keeps happening: suspect the add-ons

Programs can add things to File Explorer, such as extra entries in the right-click menu. These add-ons run inside Explorer itself, and Microsoft warns that if one of them crashes or hangs, Explorer does too.

So if File Explorer keeps freezing when you right-click a file, the culprit is quite possibly something you installed, not Windows. There’s also a setting that limits the damage, and I’d turn it on: you’ll find it in the next article.

What’s different in 26H2

This course is based on 25H2. Microsoft’s list of what’s new in 26H2 includes more archive formats and quick actions on hover in File Explorer, a faster Home page, a redesigned Start menu, and a taskbar you can move to the top, left or right. My test machine runs 25H2, so these are Microsoft’s statements, not tested here.

References

Tested on Windows 11 25H2, build 26200.9711, in a virtual machine: the window layout, shortcuts, drag behavior, address bar, file association example, Recycle Bin across drives and users, the desktop folders, libraries, Explorer process behavior and restart steps.

• File Explorer in Windows, Microsoft Support, no date shown.
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• KNOWNFOLDERID, Microsoft Learn, last updated 2022-04-07. Lists the Recycle Bin as a virtual folder, and the default paths used here.
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