I'm seriously considering changing the windows explorer explorer.exe to something else.
It seems a lot of people are very happy with Dopus, or Directory Opus.
Even with windows 7, the Microsoft-brand explorer.exe seems to not support path names over 256 characters. And since it seems that every app calls to explorer.exe to generate File, Open dialogs, that means those apps also, cannot use C:.................\filename.txt when the total length is over 256 characters.
Although the file system NTFS supports +32,000 characters.
I have the information that Total Commander, Servant Salamander, and XYPlorer all have the necessary support and can go over this artificial limit.
(This is from memory; not definitive. If you need to be sure, try a trial version.)
Opus can generally handle paths over 256 characters, e.g. when copying or renaming files.
You will still run into problems when using some programs with such long paths, though, so it's still best to avoid them, but in my experience Opus itself works okay (at least for basic stuff; I haven't tested every corner of Opus with such paths).
Using Opus will not change what happens in the File Open dialogs on your computer.
NTFS is very flexible, but most apps talk to Win32 which has more restrictions. For example, NTFS supports a lot of things that will break most Win32 programs, e.g. spaces and dots at the end of filenames.
(For things like spaces and dots at the end of filenames, Opus will try to handle them if they were created by something else but also tries to prevent you creating them by mistake. e.g. It might let you rename from such a name -- without displaying a "file not found" error like Explorer does -- but it won't let you rename to such a name, since virtually no other programs would be able to read the result. As for long paths, though, I think Opus will always let you create those but I have not double-checked.)
okay for real: when registering an account to the forum, it is necessary to choose a version of Directory Opus, whether one is 'looking' or 'possessing'.
Hello, since DOpus still doesn't install as x64 on WinOnARM Dev, I an wondering if DOpus 32bit (!) has any liminations (running on Windows 10 64bit ARM) concernning file path lengths?
Does enabling Maximum Path Length Limitation - Win32 apps | Microsoft Docs in group policies help in any way (is it necessary, and/or do you recommend this change?)
Either way, Opus has supported long paths since before the registry key was introduced to make Explorer support them, and the registry key isn't needed in Opus.
(Opus aims to let you work on paths that are already long, while avoiding creating new ones that will still cause problems with a lot if Windows software and APIs, unless you explicitly tell it to.)