ExplorerPatcher is a versatile and free tool that allows you to tweak and enhance the Windows Explorer. It comes with a range of useful features, including the ability to add new context menu items, change file name colors, and enable hidden features.
Feature summary
- Choose between Windows 11 or Windows 10 taskbar (with labels support, small icons and lots of customization).
- Disable Windows 11 context menu and command bar in File Explorer and more.
- Open Start to All apps by default, choose number of frequent apps to show, display on active monitor and more.
- Choose between the Windows 11, Windows 10 and Windows NT Alt-Tab window switcher with customization.
Lots of quality of life improvements for the shell, like:
- Skin tray menus to match Windows style, make them behave like flyouts and center them relative to the icon.
- Choose action when left and/or right clicking the network icon.
- Revert to the Windows 7 search box in File Explorer, or disable Windows Search altogether.
- Disable immersive menus and use mitigations that help you run the real classic theme without glitches.
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Discover the program"s full range of features by reading this wiki article.
ExplorerPatcher 22621.2506.60.1 changelog:
Tested on OS builds 22000.2416, 22621.2361, 22621.2506, and 23585.1001.
- Taskbar10: Partially fixed Windows 11 Start menu and Search positioning on builds 23545+ (Dev). (ac268b1)
- Changing the taskbar alignment requires restarting explorer.exe in order to take effect.
- File Explorer: Added option to disable the modern navigation bar of Moment 4. (2dc1340)
- File Explorer: Restored "Apply Mica" functionality on OS builds 22621+. (f62c532)
- Localization: Officially added translations for the following languages:
- Chinese, Simplified (Thanks @zetaloop!)
- Japanese (Thanks @creeper-0910, @reindex-ot, and @Rukoto!)
- GUI: Decoupled the Properties window into ep_gui.dll from the main DLL in order to reduce the main DLL size and to allow scalable localization. (f6f6d89, 639d7aa)
- rundll32 C:\Windows\dxgi.dll,ZZGUI will continue to work as before.
In this update, most if not all user-facing parts of ExplorerPatcher have been made localizable.
- The English texts have been put together into here and here.
- Non-English texts have been designed to be put into this separate repository. Feel free to make a PR there if you want to contribute to translations.
- Some texts have been updated to be more concise and accurate, so for existing translation fork maintainers, please double check the translations before making a PR to the said repository.
- Also for translation fork maintainers, a large number of conflicts will happen if you decide to continue merging changes from the main repository.
- Please let us know through Issues if there are still user-facing parts of ExplorerPatcher that are not localizable.
NOTE: This pre-release version is provided for testing purposes only. It may contain bugs, errors, or incomplete features that could result in unexpected behavior. Use of this version in a production environment or for critical tasks is strongly discouraged.
Please consult the README for more details.
A detailed change log is available here.
Download: ExplorerPatcher 22621.2506.60.1 | 2.0 MB (Open Source)
View: ExplorerPatcher Home Page | Features