The Purloined Setting

Modern versions of Windows provide you with a numerous amount of options. You can effectively do some very complicated and nigh-artistic things with the handful of settings that Microsoft includes by default in an XP install. You can, for instance, choose among a large variety of window styles and themes, and can vary what your icons look like, how much information a window provides, and so forth.

I'm a geek, so I like to have maximal information on everything all the time. My default folder view is "Details", which shows the filename, size, type, and modification date. There are many other options to choose from. You can include other data, such as the file's author, or if it's an audio or video clip, things like its bitrate and running time. If I could add extra columns of my own, I would.

So it should come as no surprise that I have the option checked to display the full path of the folder in the window title. What this means is that if I have two folders nested together deeply in my file tree, they will share a great many characters: "C:\Documents and Settings\toby\My Documents\something" differs only slightly from "C:\Documents and Settings\toby\My Documents\somethingelse". So when these two folders are open and minimized on my Windows taskbar, their window titles are truncated. I see two side-by-side entries, each called "C:\Documents and S...", or something to that effect. Not helpful.

My mental picture of those folders got muddled and I couldn't tell them apart without a little investigation: namely, clicking on them. So to alleviate this confusion, I went into my folder settings and disabled the option to show the full path in the window title. This made things much easier to use from the taskbar! I'm now going around and changing this setting on all my Windows systems. Both of them.

Now, here's the stupid part. It didn't occur to me to do this until yesterday. Yesterday.