Feature: Support for Windows Libraries

[Pituivan]

I'm not sure if a lot of users would find this feature useful (I would) since Libraries usage isn't standardized, so anyone who reads this please tell us what you think about this.

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What are Libraries?

Libraries are a not so well-known native Windows function that allow you to inspect several related folders at once and from the same panel. They're not folders themselves, but folder path groupings meant to unify different folders in different paths that serve the same purpose from a single view.

They're not even shown in the Windows Explorer by default; you have to go to settings and turn on an option to see and be able to use them. But they're really useful for organization purposes once you get the hang on them.

With this setting turned on in the Windows Explorer, you can see both your default Pictures folder and your OneDrive Images all from the same place: the Pictures library; and you can add more folders to that library so they'll be shown in that same panel with the already mentioned folders.

On a technical level, libraries are XML-formatted files ending with the extension .library-ms.

Why should they be supported in Files?

Because they are an excellent tool for organization and quick access to elements of the same type. Here are just a few different uses I see on them:

• With them, you can prevent excessive nesting; they are a tool of thematic grouping. If you want to classify a series of files related to each other, you don't have move them all to a new folder and break the folder structure you already had in order to have a quick access to them. Instead, you can leave them in the same path and just add them to a new library.

Imagine you're studying videogame development and you make games both as a hobby and for school works. You have two root folders withing your documents: School Projects and Personal Projects. Within each one, you have a Games folder along with various subfolders, such as Notes in the first one or Cute Cat Pics in the second one. Are you gonna combine both Game folders into a new root folder in your documents? Of course not! As a library-user, you're gonna leave them well organized and in their proper path and create a library My Games to have quick access to them.

• Less hardcore users who don't wanna waste their time navigating through a complex directory structure might find really appealing a series of hubs for accessing files of the same type scattered along their disk in a visually intuitive way.
• They can serve as a common access point for different folders on different drives.

Maybe, in addition to covering another Windows feature so that users don't have to keep changing between file explorers, we can do justice to the usefulness of libraries and make them a little bit more popular among the users.

Requirements

• Add a setting —probably inside General menu— to display a new Libraries section in the Navigation Panel.
• Show existing libraries inside that new Libraries section in the navigation panel.
• When clicking on a library through the Navigation Panel, display a view of all the folders inside that library and make them interactable.
• Add an option to create libraries and save them to disk.
• Add options to rename and delete libraries, probably in a contextual menu when right-clicking a library in the Navigation Panel. Save changes to disk.

Comments

Libraries are stored in C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Libraries.

[Josh65-2201]

Thanks for the feedback, Files has support for libraries by right clicking on the sidebar or going into the folder path you linked. You can also right click on them for all options same as Windows File Explorer.

Please also don't edit out parts of the template, we have them for a reason.