Back in the day, when you’re in File Explorer and you click one of the column headers (e.g. Date Modified), it would sort the files in ascending or descending order and take you to the top of the list. For some reason, now when I do that it sorts “around” whatever entry was highlighted when you clicked the header. So, I have to waste .02 seconds of my life to manually scroll back to the top of the list.
Obviously it’s not a big deal but it’s a weird change and I’d like to fix it if possible. Is there any way to control this behavior?
I’ve had the same question for a while now, and would also like to know. While we have the gurus here, another question, about Win 10: Is there any way to make the Quick Access folder more like the previous “Recent” folder? To make it display all the recently opened folders and files?
From my experimenting;
click on a non-file part of the window (in the file part of the window)
the Home, End, Pg Up, and Pg Dn keys also work (at least on this lap-top).
On Win 8, there’s also a “Select None” button in the new Windows Explorer ribbon. A little Googling also suggests that Ctrl+Alt+Space deselects, so if you have one file selected that should get you back to nothing.
This may or may not be related: There was a behavioral change (I think) in Vista to current position when opening or closing a folder in Explorer. Instead of maintaining current selected position in the folder tree, when expanding a new subtree it would unpredictably jump down, making you visually lose your place. This was very controversial and continued through Win 7 and Win 8, finally being fixed in Win 10. It may be you found a situation where the prior Win 7/8 behavior was preferable, or maybe they introduced this behavior (accidentally or on purpose) to fix the “folder jump down” bug.
Interesting links; thank you! I started noticing this when our work computers were upgraded to Windows 7 (yes we are painfully behind the times) so it all sort of checks out.
Until we move to Windows 10 in 2053, I can confirm that Ctrl + Space bar will ‘deselect’ anything you may have accidentally highlighted in an Explorer window.
Different strokes - I generally find it more user-friendly: I’m scrolling through a list sorted by name and find a file that I care about, and want to find other files created around the same time. Click on createDate to sort on that, and I’m positioned in the list where I was, but can see the other files from that time. Otherwise, I’d have to scroll to find my position (assuming my deteriorating memory can get me there!).
Yep, I’m sure there are just as many people who find it useful as there are people who find it a nuisance. My similarly deteriorating memory (and an enormous # of files) means I always want to see the most recent version of whatever.
Doing it your way takes away a feature. While there are multiple workaround for what you want, from scrolling back up to not selecting anything if you’re planning on sorting to unselecting anything currently selected.
There’s no easy way to get back to the item that was selected.
I see no sign that Microsoft left this as a preference, so I’m afraid you’re out of luck. Well, unless someone makes a hacked version of Explorer, but would you really trust that?