FolderHue

Color-code your folders from the Windows right-click menu.

Windows lets you change a folder icon, but only one folder at a time, through a dialog four clicks deep, and only if you already have an .ico file lying around. FolderHue turns that into a right-click: pick a color, and the folder takes it. Pick five folders first, and all five take it at once.

It is a native shell extension, not a launcher or a background app. Nothing runs when you are not using it.

Install

1. Download FolderHue-Setup.exe from the latest release.
2. Run it. No administrator rights are needed — FolderHue installs for your user account only.
3. Right-click any folder.

The installer restarts File Explorer at the end. That is not optional: Windows caches shell extensions, and the menu entry will not appear until Explorer has been restarted.

Windows will warn you the first time. The installer is not code-signed — a certificate costs a few hundred euros a year — so SmartScreen shows "Windows protected your PC". Click More info, then Run anyway. If that is a dealbreaker, build from source instead; the instructions are below and the build is reproducible.

On Windows 11, look under "Show more options" (or press Shift+F10). Windows 11 reserves its short context menu for applications distributed through the Microsoft Store, so FolderHue appears in the full menu underneath it. On Windows 10 it appears directly.

What you get

Twelve colors — red, orange, amber, yellow, green, emerald, cyan, blue, indigo, violet, pink and graphite. They are derived from your Windows folder icon, so a colored folder still looks like a folder on your machine, with the same shading and the same proportions.

Original color puts the default icon back without removing anything else.

Emblems — a small badge in the corner for important, in progress, done, locked or favorite. An emblem is independent of the color: adding one to a folder you never colored leaves its icon alone.

Multiple selection — select any number of folders, apply once.

Reset color removes everything FolderHue added to that folder, and nothing else.

How it works

No background process, and no icon overlay slot — Windows only loads about fifteen overlay handlers in total, and OneDrive, Dropbox and Git have usually taken them all. FolderHue uses the mechanism Windows itself uses for custom folder icons:

1. A multi-resolution .ico is generated once per color and emblem, in %LOCALAPPDATA%\FolderHue\icons. Coloring is a hue rotation in HSL space, which keeps the original shading and transparency — a plain RGB multiply gives a flat, muddy result.
2. The folder gets a desktop.ini pointing at that icon, merged with any desktop.ini already there rather than overwriting it.
3. SHGetSetFolderCustomSettings tells Explorer to repaint, so open windows update immediately.

A journal in %LOCALAPPDATA%\FolderHue\applied.json records what was changed. That is what makes resetting clean: the read-only attribute is removed only if FolderHue set it, and a desktop.ini that existed beforehand is restored rather than deleted.

The base icon is read from your machine with SHGetStockIconInfo, so no Microsoft artwork is redistributed.

Limits worth knowing before you install

• The icon does not travel. desktop.ini stores an absolute path inside your user profile. Move the folder to another machine, a network share or a USB stick and it goes back to the default icon.
• A hidden desktop.ini appears in the folder. Git and OneDrive may report it. Adding desktop.ini to .gitignore is usually the right answer.
• System folders are refused, on purpose. C:\Windows, Program Files, drive roots, junctions and symbolic links, and the Windows known folders — Documents, Pictures, Desktop and the rest — are all rejected with a message rather than modified.
• x64 only. The menu is an in-process extension, and Explorer cannot load an x64 extension on an ARM64 machine, emulation or not. An ARM64 build is possible but is not published today.

Requirements

Windows 10 version 1809 (build 17763) or later, or Windows 11. Nothing else: the .NET runtime is bundled, which is why the installer is around 50 MB.

Uninstall

Settings → Installed apps → FolderHue, or run unins000.exe from the install folder.

Uninstalling removes the program and its registry entries and leaves your folders exactly as they are. The uninstaller offers a checkbox — off by default — to restore the original icon of every folder it colored. Your files are never touched either way.

Build from source

.\scripts\setup-prereqs.ps1     # .NET 8 SDK, C++ build tools, Inno Setup — once
.\scripts\build.ps1             # tests, NativeAOT shell, self-contained app, installer

The installer lands in artifacts\FolderHue-Setup-1.0.0.exe.

Project	Role
src/FolderHue.Core	Business logic: HSL tinting, .ico writing, desktop.ini merging, protected paths, the journal. No graphics or shell dependency.
src/FolderHue.Shell	The context menu itself: a COM server implementing IExplorerCommand, compiled with NativeAOT because it is loaded inside explorer.exe and a managed extension would drag the CLR in with it.
src/FolderHue.App	Settings window and icon renderer — the only project that depends on System.Drawing.
installer/	Inno Setup script and the executable icon.
tests/	xUnit tests covering all of Core.

There are no NuGet dependencies outside the test project.

FAQ

Does this change my files? No. It writes a desktop.ini inside the folder and sets the folder's read-only attribute — which is what tells Explorer to read that file. It never touches what is in the folder.

Why is the folder marked read-only afterwards? Because Explorer ignores desktop.ini otherwise. It does not make the folder's contents read-only, and resetting removes the attribute if FolderHue was the one that set it.

Can I use my own colors? Not in this version. The palette is fixed at twelve colors plus the original.

Does it work with a custom Windows theme or dark mode? Yes. The icons are generated from your current Windows folder icon, whatever it looks like.

Why does the first right-click after installing show nothing? Explorer needs restarting to pick the extension up; the installer does that for you. If you skipped it, sign out and back in.

Language

The menu and the settings window follow your Windows display language: English everywhere, French on a French system. Adding a language means adding one .resx file to src/FolderHue.Core/Resources — pull requests welcome.

License

MIT. Use it, fork it, ship it.