![]() split ( ' \\ ', 1 ) def main (): with reg. split ()) backup_filename = 'IconOverlayBackup.reg' key = ( r 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion' r '\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers' ) sub_key = key. #! /usr/bin/python3 import codecs import os import winreg as reg # names of all overlay icons that shall be boosted: boost = """ Before applying the changes, it also creates a backup file of the unaltered settings that can be loaded with the registry editor in case you change your mind and want to restore everything: It simply removes all the prepended blanks from the icon names and adds only one blank to those icons I really want to use. The Tortoise clients finally gave up adding blanks, with the annoying consequence that whenever there was an update of one of the cloud clients, and they re-registered their icon handlers with a nasty amount of blanks, my so useful overlay icons for the Tortoise clients disappeared.īeing tired of renaming the icon handlers in the registry by hand, I wrote the following Python script to finally end that epic battle. This of course spurred an absurd arms race of vendors prepending names with more and more blanks in order to overtrump others already using this trick. Soon, software vendors found that there is a simple trick to get their icons into the top 10 of the overlay icons in front of all the others, just by prepending the icon names with a blank. Windows simply sorts the registered overlay icons alphabetically in the registry and uses only the first 15 of them. This means that in the end, not all overlay icons will be displayed. While all the Tortoise clients share the same icons, these are already 9 of the available slots. Several cloud services are now fighting for these few slots, and if you’re a developer, you will probably like TortoiseGit and other clients for source repositories which also use the overlay icons to display the state of the files in the registry in the Windows explorer, which is a tremendously helpful. While it didn’t matter much in former times, when they were rarely used, it has become a real problem today. Yes, even in the latest Windows 10 11, you still only have 15 slots. The problem is: Windows has only 15 slots available for such overlay icons. Some third-party tools like TortoiseGit or Dropbox make also good use of them to show the state of the files in the registry or the cloud, like whether the file has been changed, is not yet synchronized and so on. These are the tiny additions displayed in the lower left corner of the symbols for files and folders in the Windows explorer, like the small arrow that indicates a shortcut. In this case, the resources are so-called “overlay icons”. Let me explain: As so often, wars start when there are certain scarce or indivisible resources that are in demand by multiple contenders. The combatants: Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and the allied forces of TortoiseGit, TortoiseHg and TortoiseSVN. An epic battle is going on deep inside in the registry of my Windows PC.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |