(This is a reply to the discussion about full-row selection at Raymond Chen's Old New Thing. For some reason I can't post the reply normally; I think part of the text is tripping up the blog software. So I've put the reply here and just posted a link in the comments.)

"All right then, how would you have added full row select?"

I'll list some ideas/thoughts but, TBH, I probably wouldn't have made full-row-select the default (let alone mandatory if you don't know an obscure registry setting) in the first place.

Does the desire for full-row selection come from:

  1. People wanting to be able to click anywhere on a row to select things.

  2. People wanting a larger selection target, especially for small filenames, but not necessarily the entire row.

  3. People wanting a visual highlight so they can see across a row without getting mixed up with adjacent files.

Assuming one of those (or a mixture of them) is true:

FWIW, after writing this I installed Windows 7 and I've found the right-click exception confused me several times while trying to manage stuff in the network connections list. Even though I know what the right-click rules are I kept being surprised that a different context menu kept appearing when I right-clicked things that weren't already selected in the "wrong place."