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In XP there was a MenuBar called Favorites which seemed to be based on Internet Explorer Favorites. It was fantastic because it allowed for very fast tree style navigation (if set up correctly you could navigate it using first letter keystrokes, so to access a shortcut named "videos" in a folder named "files" was as quick as Alt-A f v)

This was removed in Vista (and imo generally regressed the file explorer). This was fine because I never used it, but I'm resigned to eventually embracing the inevitability that is Windows 7.

Dealing with a single non-nested list of favourites is pretty painful to me as I have quite a lot of them. Is there a way to make a tree like favorites structure in Windows 7? My fingers are crossed.

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Yep. The sidebar thing IS a treeview. click on your drive on the left you can now navigate the tree by typing letters or by using the arrow keys.

Edit: I got modded down so I guess I should illustrate.. Looks just like a treeview to me...

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Edit: Unless I got modded down for not addressing the favorites thing. Use libraries. Seems to be the new way they do things.

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Well the sidebar provides a treeview, but one that reflects the filesystem and not a user generated/maintained tree structure of favorites. Perhaps I did not fully explain in the original post, but I want to organise my favorites in a tree structure. As for libraries, I am currently using them to store some favorites but could not figure out how to make a deeply nested folder structure (e.g. have a folder development, a subfolder personal, a subfolder temp, and then a link to a folder within that - so libaries\development\personal\temp\somelink ) – fostandy Nov 21 at 8:59
Oh lol It didn't occur to me that you could deeply nest. How most people use libraries is to keep track of various types of files on their drive. So all their music, in dls, library and friends crap can be all in one folder. It sounds like you need symbolic links (dunno if you are a linux guy). technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/… should work for you nicely. Symlinks are like... having your files in 2 places at once. – Idiomatic Nov 22 at 8:27
Thanks. I currently use the [link shell extensions][schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/… to create such links in Windows XP. I do find them very useful, but I'm not sure what you are suggesting here. If you could demonstrate how to use these to answer the question of the original post (i.e. create a quickly tree based list of favorites in win7 with comparable navigation speed to that demonstrated in XP) I'll be happy to award you with the answer. – fostandy Nov 23 at 10:42
Couldn't you nest a bunch of symbolic links in a favourites folder to your various locations? – Idiomatic Nov 23 at 12:22
@Idiomatic: I can't figure out how to. Assuming this was a rhetorical question and you experimented with it before suggesting it, can you provide detailed instructions on how to do this? – fostandy 2 days ago

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