Enable Hidden Secret Animation in Details Pane of Windows Vista and 7 Explorer

Recently we posted an awesome trick to enable hidden secret animation in Windows 7 and Windows 8 Explorer’s icon views:

Enable Hidden Secret Animation in Windows 7 and Windows 8 Explorer’s Icon Views

And now its turn of Details Pane in Windows Explorer. Windows Vista and Windows 7 Explorer comes with Details Pane at bottom which shows useful details of selected files and folders. It used to known as “Common Tasks” in Windows XP and used to show at left-side area of Windows XP Explorer. In Windows 8, Microsoft has moved it to right-side area of Explorer.

Today in this tutorial, we are going to share a trick which can help you in enabling a secret animation in Windows Vista and Windows 7 Explorer’s Details Pane. After applying this trick, when you’ll select a file or folder in Windows Explorer, the Details Pane will show its detailed information with a nice animation.

You can enable 5 types of animations using this tutorial. Following are previews of the output which you are going to have:

Expand or Position Animation:

Fade Out Animation:

Rectangle Vertical Animation:

Rectangle Horizontal Animation:

So without wasting time, lets start the tutorial:

1. To enable this animation, you’ll need to edit a file called “Shellstyle.dll” present in your current Windows theme directory. For example, if you are using default Window Aero theme, you’ll get the “Shellstyle.dll” file in following directory:

If you are using Windows Classic theme, you’ll need to edit “Shellstyle.dll” file present in “Windows\System32” folder.

2. Now open this “Shellstyle.dll” file in Resource Hacker.

3. Now go to “UIFILE -> 1 -> 1033“.

4. Press <Ctrl>+F or click on “View -> Find Text…” option and type following in “Find what” textbox:

5. Now add following line of code just after the above mentioned line:

It’ll look like following image:

6. That’s it. Click on “Compile Script” button.

7. Now save the file and log off or restart your system to take effect. You can also End Task of Explorer to take effect. Or you can apply some other theme using Desktop Personalization window and then re-apply your previous theme.

8. If you face problems while direct saving of the file in Resource hacker, save the file at some other location, for example in D: drive. Then rename original “Shellstyle.dll” file to “Shellstyle_backup.dll“. Now copy your new modified “Shellstyle.dll” file to this folder. Restart your system and after restart, Windows will start using your new modified file and you’ll be able to enjoy the cute animation in Details Pane of Windows Explorer.

Some Important Things to Note:

A. The code mentioned in step 5, <element id=”atom(animation)” animation=”rectangle|exp|fast”/> will enable “Expand” animation in Details Pane.

If you want to enable other types of animations, you can use following codes instead:

Fade Out Animation:

Position Animation:

Rectangle Vertical Animation:

Rectangle Horizontal Animation:

B. The animation speed can be customized by replacing veryslow or fast keywords used in above mentioned codes with slow and veryfast keywords.

C. We enabled the animation in “General Items” folder type using the above mentioned steps. To enable the animation for all folder types such as Documents, Pictures, Music, you’ll need to insert the animation code after following lines as well as you did for General Items folder type in steps 4 and 5:

For Documents folder type:

For Pictures folder type:

For Music folder type:

PS: This method will work for all 3rd party themes as well. Simply modify the “Shellstyle.dll” file present in custom theme folder.

You can also watch following video to see all these animations live in action:

Thanks to our friend RajTheeban95 for sharing this trick…