Files and folders at your fingertips

Start by launching a web browser and visiting the Listary website. When the page loads, click the Download link and then, at the next page, click the ‘Download EXE Installer’ link. If the File Download Security Warning dialogue box appears, click Save and then choose a location for the file. Firefox users should select Save File to save the download to Firefox’s default download folder. Now find and double-click the downloaded file and work through the installation wizard, accepting all the defaults (unless you have cause to do otherwise). At the end, click to remove the tick from the ‘Watch the screencast overview’ option (unless you have a burning desire to see it) and click the Finish button.

Listary’s now installed but there’s not much to see, so try opening a folder with Windows Explorer. Choose one with plenty of files in it and then type any character and watch Listary swing into action. Here for example, we’ve typed c and two things happen. First, the Listary toolbar appears at the bottom of the Windows Explorer window and second, it displays a list of all the files in the current window that include the character ‘c’. Typing more characters will refine the search and reduce the size of the list.

Let’s look at another neat Listary trick. Leave the Windows Explorer window open, launch another program and then click File and choose Open. Upon launch, some programs will open their own default folder or the folder they last opened, but with the File Open dialogue box displayed, try holding down the Control (Ctrl) key and pressing G – the program will open whatever’s displayed in the Windows Explorer window. And if we change to a different folder in Windows Explorer and flip back to the other program, the new folder will appear in the File Open dialogue box automatically.

Now close everything and double-click on the Windows Desktop. The Listary menu pops up showing a superset of the menu bar seen in steps 1 and 2. The same menu is available anywhere in Windows Explorer as well – just double-click on an empty space. From here it’s easy to skip to a favourite folder (see Steps 5 and 6), move between any currently opened but minimised windows, skip back to a recently opened folder, or use one of the commands on the Smart menu – to show hidden files and folders, for example.

Let’s add a new folder to Listary’s Favorites menu. Roll the mouse pointer down to the Notification Area at the right of the Taskbar and right-click on the Listary icon there. Choose Options. There are loads of different settings we can change here but we’re going to look at the Favorite command, so click its button in the left-hand column. The main window shows a list of Favorites currently active – at the moment it’s just Computer and to demonstrate that we’ve opened the Listary menu on the Desktop.

To add a new item to the Favorite menu click the large green plus (‘+’) button and then choose Folder from the pop-up menu. When the Browse For Folder dialogue box appears, navigate to the folder you’d like to include, click on it once to select it and then click OK. It’ll appear in the list. Click OK to close the Options dialogue, then double-click the Desktop again and you’ll see it on the menu. Here we’ve re-opened the Options dialogue box to show it and the Desktop menu.