QTTabBar

QTTabBar adds tabbed browsing and other enhancements to Windows Explorer. This is a fork of indiff/qttabbar, updated for .NET 4.8 and modern Windows.

Changes

See CHANGELOG.md for the full version history.

Download

• Latest release

Installation

1. Run QTTabBar Setup.exe — it will install .NET Framework 4.8 automatically if not present
2. After installation, open a File Explorer window
3. Activate QTTabBar — the steps differ by Windows version (see below)

Activating on Windows 10

Explorer still has a classic toolbar, so enable the bands the normal way: right-click an empty part of the toolbar area (or use View → Options) and tick QTTabBar and QT ButtonBar. This gives the full experience, including QTTabBar's own tab bar.

Activating on Windows 11

Windows 11 removed the classic Explorer toolbar, so there's no toolbar menu to enable QTTabBar through. Instead, turn on the auto-attach option:

1. Right-click an empty area inside any folder and choose QTTabBar Options.
2. On the Window tab, tick “Enable QTTabBar on every Explorer window (experimental, must restart Explorer)”.
3. Click OK, then restart Explorer — either sign out and back in, or open Task Manager, find Windows Explorer, and click Restart.

On Windows 11, QTTabBar works alongside Explorer's own native tabs rather than showing its own tab bar. Once enabled you get:

• Double-click an empty area of a folder to go up one level
• Hover previews of text files and photos/media files

Error logs are written to %APPDATA%\QTTabBar\QTTabBarException.log.

Build

Requirements:

• Visual Studio 2022
• WiX Toolset v3.14 (command-line tools)
• NotifyPropertyWeaver (included in Tools\)

Day-to-day code changes (no installer needed):

msbuild QTTabBar\QTTabBar.csproj /p:Configuration=Release /p:SolutionDir="$pwd\\"

Cutting a versioned release installer:

.\Installer\Build-Installer.ps1 -Version 1.5.6.4

This is the only place the version number needs to be typed — the script stamps it into AssemblyInfo.cs, Installer.wxs, and Bundle.wxs, then builds the DLL, MSI, and bootstrapper. (QTUtility.CurrentVersion, shown in the About tab, reads the version from the built assembly at runtime instead of being hardcoded separately.)

Output: Installer\bin\Release\QTTabBar Setup <version>.exe (bootstrapper with embedded MSI)

Thanks

• Original author Quizo
• indiff — upstream fork maintainer
• SF Version Author