Cheddar
A file manager for Windows.
Imagine it is early 2007 and you are both bored and in possession of a fascination with the Finder from OS X 10.4, but detest Jobsian colour design and are stuck on Windows. "Fortunately," you muse to yourself, "explorer is embeddable."
That's pretty much the whole thought process behind Cheddar. It has a sidebar with bookmarks instead of a directory tree. It also has image (JPEG, GIF, BMP, and WMF only), text and HTML preview built in. (In fact, it's a better text editor than Notepad, though it doesn't print or anything.) It seemed like a good idea at the time! Also it supports DDE fully. There are a few rough spots, of course, but it all generally works. Here's the original introduction:
Cheddar is an experimental file manager based on the general principle of saying that Explorer has annoying defaults, and Finder really should come with a 'parent directory' button. It runs on top of the native Internet Explorer rendering engine (SHELL32, SHDOCVW, etc), and does so best on Windows XP with IE6. Quite what would happen under Vista is not clear.
Cheddar is written in VB6 in a sort of quick-and-dirty manner, with the objective of making the code efficient where possible. It has a number of eccentric innovations which I think are fairly mentionable.
Features and habits include
- Built-in text editor and image viewer (currently only supports JPEG, ICO, BMP, GIF, WMF, and EMF, just like VB6, but I'll get around to a proper image library eventually.)
- Encouragement of misuse of IE—run ActiveX-based document viewers directly inside your file manager.
- Sidebar inspired by Finder 10.4, which acts as a list of shortcuts to frequently-used directories or files. This can also use sub-menus (not recursive ones, though) that respond to right-click.
- Effective integration with Explorer via a separate DDE frontend, so that folders on the desktop can be opened in Cheddar just by clicking on them.
Cheddar Information
