Trisha Shetty (Editor)

Classic Shell

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Developer(s)
  
Ivo Beltchev

Available in
  
English and other

Written in
  
C++

Initial release
  
November 2009 (2009-11)

Stable release
  
4.3.0 / 30 July 2016; 7 months ago (2016-07-30)

Operating system
  
Windows 7 and later, Windows Server 2008 and later

Classic Shell is computer software for Microsoft Windows that provides user interface elements intended to restore familiar features from past versions of Windows. It focuses on the Start menu, File Explorer and Internet Explorer — three major components of the Windows shell. In particular, it can serve as a Start menu replacement for Windows 8 and Windows 10 systems.

Contents

Developed by Ivo Beltchev, it was first released in 2009, and has been downloaded more than 25 million times since. It is currently proprietary freeware, although some past versions are open source.

Features and architecture

Classic Shell is packaged as a suite of three components, all optional and independent of each other:

  • Classic Start Menu — A re-implementation of the Start Menu, replicating features from several different generations of Windows
  • Classic Explorer — An add-on to File/Windows Explorer, restoring and extending features present in various Windows releases
  • Classic IE — An add-on for Internet Explorer 9 and later, it restores the web page title to the window title bar, and various details to the status bar

    • Classic Shell is programmed in C++. Although it modifies Windows behaviors, it does not do so by modifying or tweaking Windows registry settings or replacing or patching system files — all modifications are done using Windows APIs. It is localized into more than 30 languages, including right-to-left support for Arabic and Hebrew.

    Classic Start Menu

    Classic Start Menu is a replacement for the Windows Start Menu. Features include:

  • Customize appearance of the Start button and Start Menu, and menu and submenu items
  • Show recently, or most frequently used, apps
  • Show recently opened documents, with sorting, jumplists, and pinning
  • Highlight newly installed programs
  • Separate traditional desktop apps from Universal Windows Platform apps
  • Sort menus alphabetically, by date, or custom order with drag-and-drop
  • Windows Search integration
  • Customize settings such as menu opening delay, tooltip timing, sub-menu column style, menu width, icon size, animation, scroll speed, font smoothing, etc.
  • Skinning to more completely customize the appearance
  • Scales icons and menu background to higher resolutions and/or pixel density (PPI)

    • Besides restoring past behavior, there are several new features. These include showing the menu next to the taskbar when it is vertical, multi-monitor support, launching multiple programs at once, custom shutdown-related actions, Universal app launching, expanding any file folder as cascading menus, and additional keyboard shortcuts. The search box can search the system path, can show partial matches, and can show all results inside the menu.

    Classic Start Menu can also modify Windows 8's new UI features, such as hot corners only on the desktop without disabling them inside Universal apps.

    Classic Explorer

    Classic Explorer is an add-on to Windows File Explorer, implemented as various shell extensions. It does not replace EXPLORER.EXE. Features include:

  • A toolbar that can include built-in commands, custom commands, or dropdown menus for arbitrary folders.
  • Customize the behavior and appearance of the left folder navigation pane, including whether folders expand with a single click or double click, connecting lines, subfolder indicators, horizontal scrollbar, tree item spacing, and keyboard shortcuts
  • The breadcrumb bar can be replaced with a traditional address bar, and the associated dropdown modified to show the hierarchical path instead of recent folder history
  • Sort headers in all views
  • Overlay icon for network shares
  • Status bar can show disk free space, total size of current folder
  • Tooltip of selected item
  • "Up" folder navigation button
  • Show the current folder in the title bar caption
  • Copy progress dialog can be automatically expanded to show more details
  • Replace the copy conflict dialog with one like Windows XP

    • History

    Classic Shell began as a tool for personal use, and saw its first public release in 2009 Over time, the Start Menu component evolved to be a customizable launcher that also integrated a search box and other features of the Windows 7 Start Menu. The Explorer and IE components appeared later.

    While earlier versions were compatible with Windows Vista and later, versions since 3.9.0 no longer support Windows Vista/Server 2008.

    Classic Shell was originally released as Free and Open Source Software under the MIT license. The developer wanted the source code of Classic Shell to be freely available, hoping that it would be of educational value. However, beginning with version 3.9.0, Classic Shell became a closed-source program. The author cites two reasons for the change: First, as the code grew and developed, its became more complex and specialized, and less suitable as an educational resource. Second, some people were selling Classic Shell with few or no changes or improvements.

    On 2nd August 2016, the official download service for Classic Shell was hacked and served an infected version of the download file. For a few hours, users could inadvertently download an infected version which would rewrite their Master Boot Record and would cause Windows to not start up correctly.

    Reception

    Classic Shell was a fairly popular interface enhancement in the Windows 7 lifecycle but became more widely used after the release of Windows 8.

    It has seen coverage in such publications as Forbes, The Register, Lifehacker, Neowin, Ghacks, ZDNet, PC World, TechRepublic, MakeUseOf, and Betanews.

    References

    Classic Shell Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA