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Viewing Folder Size in Windows Explorer


Question

One cool thing about the Mac OS is that when browsing through folders, you can view the size of the folders along with the size of the files. In Windows, to view folder size, you must either right-click on the folder and go to Properties or use the Tooltip in Windows XP. (For larger folders, you sometimes have to hover over a folder 3 or 4 times for it to calculate the whole size, otherwise it will estimate that it's "Larger than X MB" until it can get the whole size.)

I'm looking at this:

http://www.codeproject.com/shell/DirectorySize.asp

No, I know zero about programming, but this in its current form seems to work really well.

The question is this:

Does anyone know wneough about programming to do two things with this?

a.) Make it do smart size naming. If you look at the picture, it puts some things in MB, some would be in KB. When you install it, it just shows KB, which makes for some really big numbers (with no commas.) The catch with this is in sorting. Even though 423 is bigger than 42, 42 MB is bigger than 423 KB. Unfortunately, the program that inspired this search has a problem with this. It just looks at the number it prints and not the actual size.

b.) Make it also show the file size. The benefit of this is that you don't have to have 2 columns as shown in the picture. You can turn off the "Size" column, and turn on the "Folder Size" column so that you just have one column to see the size of everything. Naturally, if you could do this, you'd want to rename it somehow so that it doesn't say "Folder" Size. You'd probably want it to say just "Size" but you'd probably have to think of some way to make it different from what the current "Size" column says.

I don't know how hard this is to do, because, as I said, I couldn't program my way out of a paper bag.

I guess I'm not really expecting anyone to do all of this, but it would be cool if someone were to take this on and make it all work. I just don't like the idea of paying for stuff if there are free alternatives.

There is source code on that site already, it's just a matter of making a few small additions or something... idaknow.

I suppose someone could just tell me it's entirely too much work and can't be done. Then I can give up my dream... but it would be incredibly useful if it *could* be done...

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Smart size naming, as you call it, would be fairly trivial to implement. Showing file size and directory size in the same column might require a sizeable addition of code (depending how well-written the DLL is; I haven't looked at the source).

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Instead of modifying the Size column, which would be difficult(?), maybe make a new column that would list both folder and file sizes.

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