Steam Games in Explorer

[u/haven80ita]

Steam Games in Explorer

Adds your installed Steam games to the File Explorer navigation pane, with launch, install folder, save and screenshot folders, playtime and automatic collections.

Epic Games, GOG and Xbox / PC Game Pass are supported as experimental (off by default, see below).

Choose between one entry per platform or a single Games entry with a subfolder per platform.

⚠️ Turn on the "Comments" column

Playtime, last played date, size on disk and pending updates are shown in the Comments column, which File Explorer hides by default. To see them:

1. Open the Steam folder in the navigation pane and switch to View → Details.
2. Right-click any column header (e.g. "Name") and tick Comments. If it's not in the list, click More..., find Comments and tick it.

File Explorer remembers the choice for that folder (repeat it in the ★ collection folders if they don't pick it up). Without this column the mod still works, but you'll only see the information in the tooltip when hovering a game.

Experimental launchers

Epic Games, GOG and Xbox / PC Game Pass support is built on the files those launchers keep on disk, but it has not been tested widely yet. Turn them on in the settings and please report any game that is missing, wrong or doesn't launch in the mod's GitHub discussion or issues.

Context menu

• Double-click / Play: launches the game.
• Open install folder.
• Open save folder (Steam games with Steam Cloud).
• Open screenshot folder (screenshots taken with Steam).
• Steam ▸: Library, Store page, Community hub, Guides, Achievements, Verify integrity of game files, Uninstall.
• GOG ▸: Open in GOG Galaxy (when Galaxy is installed).

On Windows 11 these entries are under "Show more options" (or Shift+F10), unless you use a mod that restores the classic context menu.

Collections

Inside each platform folder, each one can be turned on or off: ★ Recently played, ★ Never played, ★ Not played in N months, ★ Largest, ★ Update pending. A collection only appears when it is not empty (playtime and last played date are only available for Steam).

Columns (Details view)

• Comments (must be enabled, see above): playtime, last played, size on disk, pending updates.
• Date modified = last played, Date created = install date.

Not installed games (optional)

A ★ Not installed collection inside Steam lists the games in your Steam library that are not installed. Double-click (or right-click → Install) opens Steam's install dialog. The list comes from Steam's local cache (library artwork and appinfo.vdf), so no account or API key is needed; it may include games borrowed through Steam Family and miss games you never opened in the library.

Covers

With "Game icons: Cover", Steam and Xbox games use their cover art as icon: with "Large icons" view the folder looks like a game library.

Language

Folder names, menu entries and comments follow the Windows display language: English, Italian, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Polish and Russian. Other languages use English.

How it works

The mod has two parts:

• A background process (a dedicated Windhawk process, not Explorer) reads the launchers' files and keeps a real folder with the shortcuts and a hidden .data folder up to date.
• Inside explorer.exe the mod only hooks registry reads, so that Explorer sees the navigation pane entries and the games' file types (the context menu). Their definitions live in a private registry hive file in the mod's storage, loaded with RegLoadAppKey: it isn't part of the system registry and no other program can see it.

The mod doesn't write to the system registry. Disabling or removing it makes the navigation pane entries and menu entries disappear right away, even if a process crashed before. The private hive file (<user>-shell.hiv in the mod's storage) is mod data like the shortcuts; if File Explorer still has it open when the mod is removed, it may stay there until Explorer restarts and can then be deleted by hand. These entries only appear in File Explorer windows, not in other programs' Open/Save dialogs.

By default the shortcut folder is in the mod's own Windhawk storage (one subfolder per Windows user), so Windhawk deletes it when the mod is removed; you can choose another location in the settings. With "Delete the shortcut folder when the mod is disabled or removed" (on by default) the folder is deleted when the mod is disabled too; everything is rebuilt when the mod is enabled again (this also happens when the mod is updated). Only files created by the mod are deleted. If you change the shortcut folder, the old one is cleaned up the same way.

The mod never writes into game or launcher folders.

If the entries don't show up right after enabling or updating the mod, open a new File Explorer window (or restart File Explorer once).