This is a work in progress, stuff in red are things I’ll elaborate on later

Sync apps like Dropbox work by having a folder on the computer that synchronizes with the cloud. However it is also possible to synchronize files outside this folder by using symbolic or hard links. Links are kind of like more advanced shortcuts that lets you link to content in other areas of the computer. For instance, syncing settings in some application on multiple computers can be done by linking them together via a dropbox-folder.

Creating links usually works by opening the command line and using the “mklink”-command. However it would be nice to be able to do the same thing by right clicking and dragging files as well. In this little project we figure out how to do that by means of “shell extensions”. The DLL-file we create in this project is available on Github, and some simple bash-scripts makes (un)installing easy.

The following post is basically just me rambling on about the things I did and learned (to force myself to rethink the steps). It might not even be educational, and I’ll add all the most relevant links at the bottom.

Continue reading Creating symbolic links by drag and drop in Windows →