ZenerdDirPrint

May 2001 – Jun 2001 · age 19

What it was

A right-click "Print" for Windows folders, something Windows itself never offered. A windowless MFC program of about 230 lines walked a folder, optionally recursively, asked the shell for each entry's type name, sorted folders and files, and wrote the listing as an HTML table whose first column was a single Wingdings character that rendered as a folder or a document icon. Then it asked the shell to open the page in the browser and to print it, and exited. A 42-line INF script installed it as the "Zenerd Print Driver", added "Print" and "Recursive Print" to every folder's context menu, and registered an uninstaller that ran the same script backwards. Commented out inside sat the skeleton of an older file indexer, reused as the template for its walk.

Wins, for the age

• At nineteen, Jeff replaced a whole native print pipeline with two shell calls: write HTML, let the browser paginate and print it. Internet Explorer had offered that door since 1997; this primate walked through it instead of fighting device contexts by hand.
• Became part of the operating system in 42 lines, using the vendor's own mechanism exactly as intended, with an uninstaller for free.
• Used a font that shipped with every Windows install as an icon set, the trick Webdings had packaged in 1997, found here for a printed table.
• Shipped completely: code, installer, uninstaller, a versioned binary, one release package, built before dawn. A small tool treated as a product by an ape who could have just used a batch file.

What it taught

• Delegate rendering to the most capable renderer already installed. That instinct shows up again and again, at much larger scale.
• Packaging is part of the work. The installer was written the same afternoon the code was started.
• Reusing your own old code as a template is fast, and leaves fossils behind.
• Test every menu item you install. The "Recursive Print" registry line put its flags inside the quoted command and would have failed, and neither verb quoted the folder path, so names with spaces would break.

Genealogy

Ancestors: none on record. A standalone utility with an older indexer in its bones. Descendants: Wake: generate HTML and let a mature renderer do the rest, as a static site. Marketing Department: write once, export pages through a hand-rolled template engine.

Epitaph

Here lies ZenerdDirPrint, which gave Windows a right-click "Print" for folders by writing HTML and letting the browser do the rest: when something else can render it, let it.