Browsing folders and selecting icons

Opening a folder

Choose File ‣ Open Folder… (Ctrl+Shift+O), or switch to View ‣ Explorer (F5) and choose the … browse button. Select a local folder. IconVectors scans the SVG files and lists direct child folders in that folder; it does not scan inside those child folders.

The editable folder address shows the complete current path. Typing or pasting does not change the folder until you press Enter; Escape restores the active path. An invalid address leaves the current folder and thumbnails unchanged so you can correct the text. The chevron at the right of the address opens Recent Folders, a newest-first list of up to 20 successfully opened explicit roots. A root enters this list only when accepted from the address field, the … browse button, File ‣ Open Folder…, or the equivalent MCP open-folder command. Choosing an existing recent item may promote it. Navigating to a child or parent, using Back or Forward, restoring Explorer at startup, refreshing, or reconciling watcher changes does not add or promote a recent entry. Equivalent path spellings appear only once, and the list persists between sessions. If selecting a recent item confirms that the folder itself is definitively gone, IconVectors shows the normal open error and then removes and saves that entry immediately. Access-denied folders, transient network failures, unavailable mapped or removable drives, and cancelled, busy, stale, or superseded navigation remain recorded. The failed open never replaces the accepted folder or changes its grid, history, or watcher.

When Explorer is first activated in a newly launched instance, it first tries the last successfully visited folder saved in its navigation history, including a child folder or a position reached with Back or Forward. If that location cannot be restored, it tries the newest available Recent Folder, then older entries, before falling back to IconVectors Icons inside the operating system’s Documents folder. A new profile creates and opens that Documents folder. An explicitly requested launch folder takes precedence over this restoration. Normal application startup still opens the Editor workspace; remembering a folder does not make Explorer open automatically.

Accepted folder changes are saved immediately, without waiting for the window to close. A newly launched instance can therefore restore the saved location while the earlier instance remains open. Pending, failed or cancelled navigation does not replace the last accepted location.

While Explorer is active, the main-window title shows only the selected folder’s name, for example Axialis IconVectors - Folder "My Icons". A filesystem root is shown using its meaningful root label. The full folder path, filter, and selected filename are not placed in the title.

The compact Explorer header contains the editable address, New Folder and New Icon buttons beside the … browse button, compact available-drive buttons on Windows, SVG-only Back and Forward buttons immediately before Filter, the Size and Background controls, and authoritative icon and selection counts. All controls remain on one row.

Filenames appear progressively while the scan is running. A conditional status row reports scanning or cancellation and offers Cancel only while it applies; it disappears after an ordinary successful scan. Each visible tile first shows Loading thumbnail, then the rendered SVG preview. An invalid, missing, changed, oversized, or unsupported SVG shows Thumbnail unavailable without stopping the folder scan. The status row reports a bounded count of unavailable previews. The unavailable caption appears on two lines, centered horizontally and vertically in the preview area.

Note

Thumbnail generation deliberately does not load SVG image elements or external bitmap resources. Such files show the unavailable placeholder in this version.

Changing folders inside Explorer

When the current folder has a navigable parent, the first grid entry is .. with the dedicated yellow-folder and blue-arrow image supplied for that entry. Its colors do not change with the application theme. It is drawn at the same size as the normal folder image, which remains unchanged for direct child folders. Direct child folders follow in canonical name order. SVG files appear after the folders in the existing file order. A filesystem root has no .. entry. From a direct child of a Windows drive root, including a folder with a Unicode name, .. opens the absolute drive root rather than a drive-relative path.

Folders and .. use the normal blank Explorer background rather than an SVG preview card. They have no preview frame, checkerboard or loading/failure thumbnail graphic, and submit no thumbnail rendering work. Their normal folder resource and label remain aligned to the current grid layout. Hover and focus follow the active theme, and selecting a folder keeps the full-tile blue selection background.

Double-click a folder or .. to open it. You can also make it the active or accessibility-focused entry and press Enter, invoke its accessibility default action, or choose Open Folder from the context menu. Folder entries are navigation targets rather than SVG selections: they are never copied, previewed as SVG, rendered as thumbnails, or included in an SVG batch operation. One direct-child folder can be renamed, and a confirmed empty direct-child folder can be deleted, as described in Managing files and drag and drop.

Folder navigation uses the same guarded adoption as the address and recent folder routes. The address, title, history, and folder watcher change only after the destination is accepted. An inaccessible or otherwise invalid destination reports the failure and leaves the accepted folder and grid unchanged. Navigation remains non-recursive, including through filesystem links and aliases.

Switching Windows drives

On Windows, compact buttons for the currently available logical-drive letters appear in drive-letter order immediately to the right of the … browse button. IconVectors refreshes the set when Explorer is created, whenever you enter or re-enter the Explorer workspace, and when you use Explorer Refresh; it does not poll for drive changes. The header remains one row even when several drives are available. If the drive set is unusually large, the buttons remain in a single horizontally scrollable area while the folder path stays usable; use the mouse wheel over the buttons or Left, Right, Home, and End while a drive button has focus to reach buttons outside the visible area.

Selecting a drive returns to the latest folder successfully visited on that drive, including after restarting IconVectors. Drive identities are stored as canonical uppercase drive-letter keys. A drive that has no remembered folder opens at its root. IconVectors loads this bounded versioned setting without testing whether the recorded drive or folder is currently available. If a remembered folder is no longer available when selected, IconVectors retries the drive root without replacing the accepted Explorer folder with an intermediate failure. A successful fallback remembers the root for later sessions.

Drive shortcuts use the same guarded navigation and Back/Forward history as other Explorer folder routes. They do not promote Recent Folders. Failed or cancelled attempts, including stale or superseded requests, do not change the accepted folder, history position, watcher, or remembered per-drive folder. If the requested folder is already the current canonical folder, selecting its drive is a no-op and does not add a duplicate history entry. Only a successfully accepted destination updates the persisted per-drive folder.

Going Back and Forward

Use the Back and Forward buttons in the Explorer header, the matching Explorer menu commands, or the first two commands in the grid context menu. The buttons contain arrow images only; their tooltips and accessibility names identify them. No keyboard accelerator is assigned.

Back/Forward history is separate from Recent Folders. It records every accepted folder visit, whether the folder came from an explicit root action, a recent item, a child folder, .., or the equivalent MCP command. Refresh and watcher reconciliation do not add visits. Consecutive equivalent paths and same-folder navigation do not create duplicate visits, while a real non-consecutive revisit is retained. Navigating normally after Back removes the abandoned Forward branch. Back and Forward move through the existing entries without appending new ones.

The history and current position persist between sessions, with at most 100 entries. Each accepted change saves them immediately. On its first activation in a newly launched instance, Explorer tries that saved current position before Recent Folders and the default fallback, unless an explicit launch folder was requested. Restoring the saved current folder preserves its exact history position, including Forward entries, even if that folder appears again later in the history. A different accepted explicit or fallback startup destination aligns with its latest matching history entry or is appended once. Startup does not promote Recent Folders. If a Back or Forward destination is unavailable, the normal folder error is reported and both the accepted folder and history position remain unchanged. Unavailable history entries remain recorded.

Refreshing a folder

While Explorer is active, choose Explorer ‣ Refresh or press Ctrl+R to rescan the active folder explicitly. IconVectors also monitors the current direct folder: external additions, modifications, renames, and removals are coalesced and reconciled automatically without requiring Refresh. Monitoring is non-recursive and is rebound when the active folder changes. If monitoring is unavailable, manual Refresh remains usable.

The current grid remains available while the refresh is prepared. A successful refresh adds new SVG files, updates changed files, and removes files that no longer exist. It preserves the current filter and display settings, retains selection and scroll targets that still exist, and reuses compatible cached thumbnails. A refresh that is cancelled or fails leaves the last accepted grid and interaction state intact. Starting another refresh supersedes the one in progress.

A file renamed outside IconVectors appears automatically as one removed file and one new file. Use the Explorer Rename command when you want the selection and active tile to follow the new filename.

Browsing large folders

The grid creates no window for each file. It lays out the full item count but renders and prepares only the visible tiles and a bounded nearby range. This keeps scrolling responsive for folders containing thousands of direct SVG files.

Scroll normally, resize the window, or use the controls above the grid:

• Size offers 64, 96, 128, 192, and 256 logical-pixel choices. Tiles, previews, and spacing follow the current screen’s display scaling, keeping the filename area in proportion to the text on high-DPI screens. Moving between screens does not change your selected logical size.

• Background offers Light, Dark, Checkerboard, and Borderless previews.

Changing either control replaces incompatible pending work. Returning to a recently viewed range can reuse compatible previews from the bounded in-memory cache. Explorer settings and folder state remain in memory when you switch to Editor and back. The recent-folder list is persisted across application launches; thumbnail cache and interaction state are not.

An SVG tile shows its logical canvas dimensions below the filename. Its tooltip combines the filename, dimensions, scan-time modification time, and file size. A direct-child folder shows the number of SVG files directly inside it as No Icon, 1 Icon, or N Icons. Folder counts are non-recursive and are prepared after visible and nearby SVG thumbnails so that browsing remains responsive. Counts appear automatically when ready, including the first time you open Explorer in a session; you do not need to leave and reopen the folder.

Checkerboard follows the effective application theme: it uses the existing light checkerboard in the light UI and a subtle two-tone dark checkerboard in the dark UI. Borderless preserves SVG transparency while allowing the unselected tile, preview, filename, and dimensions to blend into the effective Explorer theme background. Light and Dark preview choices do not change with the application theme. Theme changes use the application’s normal restart workflow.

Filtering entries

Type in Filter to show matching direct child folders and SVG filenames in the current folder. Matching is a literal substring of the complete displayed folder or filename, including the .svg extension for files. On Windows, matching uses invariant Unicode case-insensitive comparison. On Linux and macOS, native filename bytes use ASCII A-to-Z case folding only; non-ASCII case variants remain distinct. No platform performs Unicode normalization. Spaces are significant; the filter does not interpret wildcards, regular expressions, or search tokens. The valid .. entry always remains visible. Filtering uses entries already accepted by the current scan and does not rescan the folder or render thumbnails merely because the filter changed.

Selected files that do not match remain selected but hidden. The header count shows visible versus total icons while filtering and includes the complete canonical selection count, including hidden selections. Clearing the filter restores the hidden selection highlights.

Filter by filename, then select the matching icons for file commands or batch processing. Check the selection count for any hidden selections.

An empty direct folder says No SVG files in this folder. A filter with no visible result says No filenames match "filter text", preserving the entered filename text between straight ASCII double quotes. The no-folder message is reserved for the exceptional case where neither Documents nor another valid folder can be opened. These states remain inside the focusable virtual grid and do not create item windows.

Selecting and navigating

Click an SVG tile to select it. Clicking a folder makes it the active navigation target without adding it to the SVG file selection. Use Ctrl+Click to toggle an SVG tile, Shift+Click to select a visible range, and Ctrl+Shift+Click to add a visible range. Clicking unused grid space clears the selection.

When the thumbnail grid has keyboard focus:

• Arrow keys move by one tile or one visual row.

• Home and End move to the first and last visible tile.

• Page Up and Page Down move by approximately one viewport.

• Hold Ctrl while navigating to move the active tile without replacing the selection.

• Hold Shift while navigating to extend a visible range.

• Hold Ctrl+Shift while navigating to add the visible range to the existing selection.

• Ctrl+A selects all currently visible SVG matches; navigation entries are excluded.

• Space selects the focused SVG tile; Ctrl+Space toggles it. A folder remains an active navigation target without entering the SVG selection. The active tile is used when no virtual tile owns focus.

• Enter opens the virtually focused folder or SVG file, or the visible active entry when no virtual tile owns focus. Folders navigate in Explorer; SVG files open in Editor.

• Shift+Enter opens the focused SVG in its own IconVectors window.

• Escape clears the selection.

• Shift+F10 opens the same Explorer context menu as a right-click.

Right-clicking an unselected SVG tile selects and activates it before the menu opens. Right-clicking a selected SVG tile preserves the complete multi-selection and makes that tile active. Right-clicking a folder makes it the active navigation target without adding it to the SVG selection. Right-clicking unused grid space preserves the selection. For a folder or .. target, Open Folder is the first and bold default command. For an SVG target, Open Icon is first and bold and opens only the tile under the mouse, even when several SVGs are selected. The target is revalidated before the command runs. Open Icon in a New Window… follows it and uses Shift+Enter; Shift-double-click uses the same route. A separated current-folder group offers New Folder…; on unused grid space it is placed prominently. Back, Forward, and Refresh remain shared navigation commands, while the lower file group keeps Save and Close for the current open SVG, Rename or Batch Rename, Delete, Select All, Copy, Paste, Duplicate, Group in Folder, and Batch Processing with their usual enabled states. Opening the menu does not refresh the folder.

The active tile is kept visible while navigating. Filtering, resizing, changing thumbnail size or background, and switching to Editor and back retain the current Explorer interaction state when it remains applicable. Opening a different folder clears the old selection, active tile, range anchor, and scroll position while retaining the filter and display controls.

Opening folders and system locations

The folder context menu includes Open Folder, Open in a New Window, and Open in Windows Explorer where applicable. Open Folder navigates the current Explorer. Open in a New Window starts another normal IconVectors window at that folder. Open in Windows Explorer delegates to the Windows shell without changing the active IconVectors folder.