The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Make these hidden folders. Like drag my workshop audacity projects to a hidden folder so it will not show on desktop. and my niece's dont pull up my stuff, giggle and play it at sunday dinner. sometimes it could be un cool.

Tell the truth, you want to hide your pronz, don't you.

I don't know how to actually hide a folder. But you can make a folder several folders deep with uninteresting names, like taxes and my commemorative plate collection, then on the last folder containing your stuff, have the view as detail (I think) and slide the panes over so no folder shows. But you'll know when you get there that you have to slide the pane over to click your folder. Honestly, I'm just thinking as I'm typing. So you'll need to try it to see if that works, lol.

Or just label your music folder - "PORN"

1. Don't put it on the desktop. Seems obvious, but whatever.

2. Change the file property to 'hidden'. This has not changed since at least Windows XP, and it probably goes back to 3.1. Right-click the folder, choose properties, check Hidden. Poof. Gone. How to show it? go to Folder Options (you'll have to find that one yourself), and check "show hidden files and folders". Hidden files will show up ghosted (semi-transparent). If the file shows up ghosted when you change it to hidden, you already have "show hidden files and folders" checked and you have to uncheck it to truly hide the folder.

SPUD

Also you don't have to remember to show and hide hidden folders if you remember the location. If you go to the start menu then select 'run' (or hold down the windows key and press R) then you can type in the path to open up an explorer window. So, for example, you can put your hidden stuff in a directory called 'hidden' at the top level of your hard drive and then run '\hidden' from the start menu.

If you want to open it from a file dialog box in an application, you can just type it in to the filename and hit enter - since the file will exist and be a directory, the dialog box will go there.

If I remember I can post screenshots from my Windows machine at work tomorrow.

Why don't you just create a separate user account for music or whatever?

You'd be amazed at how hard it is for people to get used to switching user accounts.

fluffy wrote:You'd be amazed at how hard it is for people to get used to switching user accounts.

Because using hidden folders is easier?

I think the reason that it is hard for people because it is unclear what user accounts are all about. If I make a folder in one account, can it not be seen from another account? That is not clear to me. "Hidden Folders" is a pretty clear concept.

I guess my suggestion goes beyond the simple access issue. With a separate account you can configure/optimize the setup for making music. If it takes a day to figure out I'd think that's time well spent. But yes, with Windows it's pretty cookoo.

When someone asks how to hide a folder, it already fits into their mental model. I have learned not to try to educate users on the right way to do things when they're dead-set on just adding a quick hack to an existing setup, even if the right way (in this case, user switching) helps in a lot of other places too.

Very good, fluffy. I am one of those who is really aggravated when I post on a form asking something and the most repeated response is "why would you want to do that?". This attitude kept me from solving the very real problem of running a very specific application from a particular browser in a very tightly-defined situation, in which it was my only option. My question was "how can I control wirecast (name of application) from within IE? I posted this on various help forums (wirecast tech support, user board, etc.), and all I got was "why would you want to do that", "you can't do that", "don't control it from a browser", "use a different browser", or "use a different application". None of these were helpful in the least. It turned out that javascript worked just fine.

Just curious about the responses, though. What ARE hidden folders good for, if not hillbilly's use, which we all know is really hiding porn?

They're a relic from the DOS days. Generally, I think the idea was that applications (or, these days, the OS itself) could use them to hide files and folders that are not typically interesting or useful to users, to reduce cluttering.
In UNIX land, the same concept exists: if the name of a file or folder begins with a dot, it's not normally shown in any listings. These "dotfiles" are used primarily for configuration/cache files.