Windows 7: Full Row Selection

Hello James,

There's this option below for full row selection in Windows 7, but it does have some side effects that may not be wanted by you. You might take a look at it to see.

How to Disable Full Row Select in Explorer in Windows 7? - The Winhelponline Blog

Hi Brinks,
Thanks for your response. I think I can live with the side effects, especially since I don't ever use the preview pane. Ever. The other reported issues are so minor as to not be an issue at all.

It'll be nice to have the ability to disable FRS back (can't figure out why FRS would be useful for anyone).

Thanks again,
James

You're most welcome James. Please let us know how it works for you.

Unfortunately, there is one glitch that keeps me from employing the winhelponline fix, which may seem insignificant, but is important enough to me to discontinue use of the FRS fix:

The Tile bug. It somehow changes the tiles so that when I have Tiles set for Computer, I am no longer able to view drive space as a horizontal bar, only as an icon, list, etc.

This is important to me because I have several machines with several drive partitions (on the machine I'm posting from right now, I have 12 partitions). The easiest way for me to monitor disk space is via the Tile bar. So I've removed the hack and am back to FRS.

I guess I'll wait until a fix is found (if one is found...). Thanks, Brink, for your help.

James

Thank you James for posting back with this side effect that you found.

Is this discussion about having the entire row highlighted when you select a file or folder in Windows Explorer, like this?



If so, why is this a problem? To me it helps define what is selected and makes it clear all the way across. I use Details view so perhaps that's why it's a plus rather than a minus for me?

Just curious.

Hello Truker,

It's about to have the ability to toggle between full row selection like you have above or to only have the Name column selected instead. It's to have it like in the Vista tutorial below, but it doesn't work in Windows 7.

Select Files - Disable or Enable Full Row Select - Vista Forums

Unfortunately this doesn't really solve the issue, it just makes it different. You still have to move all the way off the selection to re-select anything (without just dragging it), and you can't select the longer titles out of a list of various items.

I guess I'm just dense, as I don't see why name select is better or more useful than full row select.

I do understand that the real problem is it was available with Vista, which I never owned or played with, and is not available in Windows 7. Seems like that would be very easy to put back with an update.

Add this to the list of other GUI changes made for Windows 7 that I don't understand either.

When FRS was not in play (as in XP), one merely moved off to the right (just past the file or folder name) and clicked to deselect. With the advent of Vista, this became impossible. If one wanted to deselect, one had to move to the right of all the columns to deslect the file, often having to scroll all the way to the right, and even widening the window to reach the area where one could click to deslect.

This may not make sense to you, but I found the ability to turn off FRS useful.

That said, the reality now is that (with Windows 7) MS has considered this issue and provided an alternative, which makes it easier to live with FRS (and that I often forget to employ...).

This compensatory 'fix' is that MS left a small area just to the left of any file or folder (right pane) that one can click on to deselect the currently selected file or folder. In fact, in the left folder pane, one can even highlight a folder without selecting it or leaving the folder contents of the currently selected folder merely by clicking on the small space to the left of the folder.

Perhaps you are now more confused than ever, but if you see no problem with FRS, then it really isn't an issue. The great thing about Windows 7 is that it tries to accomodate all.

James