HOBComment is a Windows Explorer shell extention that enables you to right-click to add a comment to a folder; it will also allow to do the same to add comments to files on your NTFS partitions.
I’ve been looking for some time for an easy way to add comments to my files and folders at work; with HOBComment I’ve found a way. This tiny app will add a right-click ‘Add Comment’ command within Windows Explorer shell that will allow you to do just that (see screenshot). It will also allow you to right-click to add comments to any file if it resides on an NTFS partition. (Note that if you have a FAT32 partition you can still add comments to files, but you will have to do so normally by right clicking on a file / properties / summary, and entering your comments within the comment box.)
To view your comments in Windows XP, you will need to install HOBCommentXP in addition to HOBComment. HOBCommentXP will add a new “File/Folder Comments” column visible in the Windows Explorer ‘detail’ view where you can see your comments (for Windows 2000, it seems that this is not necessary, although I can’t test this on my machine). You can remove the original ‘comments’ column from your detail view and replace it with this one (this new “File/Folder Comments” column will mirror the contents of the original ‘comments’ column). You can do this so that applies to all of your folders as follows (for Windows XP):
- Once you have HOBCommentXP installed, open a folder and select view / detail
- Right click on a column header and click ‘more’ on the resulting menu.
- Uncheck ‘comments’ and check ‘File and Folder Comments’
- Go to the folder file menu and select Tools / Folder Options
- Click on the view tab then the ‘Apply to all Folders’ button.
I don’t know why you can’t easily add and view comments to files and folders with Windows (is this available in Vista?), but I know that it could add considerable value, especially if you work with and/or create a lot of files like I do.
HOBComment may not be the most elegant setup, but if you want an easy way to add notes it works well enough (for some reason, though, I wasn’t able to add comments to my Excel .XLS files through the context menu, had to do it the ‘normal’ way). Also, the author did not provide uninstallers, but I can provide these here.
Version tested: 1.07 beta
Compatibility: Windows 2000, XP.
Go to the HOBComment page, HOBCommentXP page (for Windows XP install them both).
