Storage locations
Storage locations are the places on your machine that are not ordinary folders: disk partitions, USB sticks and external drives, mapped network drives, WSL distributions, and portable devices such as a phone or a camera on a cable. This page covers how they look in the sidebar and in This PC, and what is different once you go in.
WSL and portable devices are Windows-only. On macOS and Linux the sidebar's Storage page lists only volumes. Select Storage in the sidebar tab strip to view these locations.
The sidebar "Storage" page
The Storage page keeps all of these together, one row each:
| Row | What you see |
|---|---|
| Local partition | The volume label, plus a drive letter on Windows, with a capacity bar underneath |
| USB stick / external drive | Same; the row disappears when you unplug it |
| Network drive | A mapped drive letter on Windows, or the mounted share's name on macOS |
| WSL distribution | The distribution name, with a terminal-frame icon tinted to match it |
| Portable device | The phone's or camera's name, with a device silhouette icon |
The last two carry no capacity bar. Reading the size of a WSL distribution means starting its virtual machine, and reading a device's capacity means going out to the device, and tessoa does not do either just to list the row.
Capacity text on a narrow sidebar
Drag the sidebar narrower and the capacity text degrades in three steps, while the label and drive letter stay complete throughout:
| Step | What the second line says |
|---|---|
| Wide | 58.0 GB / 238 GB |
| Middle | 58.0 GB free |
| Narrow | 76% |
Every row on the page uses the same step, so you never get one row reading 76% next to another reading 1.5 TB / 1.8 TB.
The Type column in This PC
At the This PC level the columns change wholesale, and the Type column reads one of these (the column names are listed in View modes):
| Type column | What it is |
|---|---|
| Local Disk | A partition built into the machine that cannot be unplugged |
| Removable Disk | USB sticks, SD cards, external drives, optical drives |
| Network Drive | A share mapped to a drive letter on Windows, or a mounted network share on macOS |
| Portable Device | Phones, cameras, some media players |
Drive, capacity, free space and file-system information on a portable device row read —. tessoa does not make an extra request to the device to obtain these values at this level.
On macOS, Type distinguishes local disks, removable disks and network drives, and File System shows the format reported by the system, such as APFS, exFAT or SMBFS. macOS and Linux do not show the Drive column.
The Type column is about whether the thing can be detached from the machine. The storage-medium setting that decides whether folder sizes are calculated automatically is a separate judgement, see Settings overview.
The Drive column
On Windows, This PC has one column an ordinary folder does not: Drive, right after Name, holding the volume's drive letter (C:). Volumes without one, and portable devices, read —. The column belongs to This PC alone and disappears when you enter an ordinary folder.
Entering This PC sorts by drive letter by default, giving C:, D:, E: in order, with rows that have no letter sorted by name after them. The switch only touches tabs still on the default sort key (Name): if you deliberately picked Size or Type on this page, that choice is not overridden. Leaving This PC switches the key back to Name — an ordinary folder has no Drive column, and leaving the key there would strand you on a key you cannot switch away from.
If you had reordered the columns before 0.22.0, Drive appears at the far right rather than next to Name: any column your saved order does not mention is appended at the end, so the order you set up is not thrown away over a new column. Drag the header to put it where you want it, see Arrange the interface.
Plugging and unplugging
Plug in a USB stick or an external drive and a row appears in both the sidebar's Storage page and This PC; unplug it and both drop the row again. No refresh, no reopening the tab.
Ejecting a volume on macOS
On macOS, tessoa can eject a volume when the system permits it:
- Right-click a single volume on the sidebar's Storage page or in This PC.
- Click Eject.
- Wait for Ejected "volume name" — safe to unplug before disconnecting the device.
Eject appears only for a single ejectable storage location. It is absent for multiple selections, ordinary folders and volumes the system does not allow to be ejected. A failure reads Could not eject "volume name"; close programs still using files on the volume, then try again. Windows and Linux do not offer this menu item.
WSL distributions
On a machine with WSL installed, every distribution takes a row in the Storage page. Click one to enter its file system, the same way you would enter a network location.
Listing those names does not start the distributions. tessoa only reads the list of distributions out of the registry, so a distribution that is not running will not be started because you opened tessoa. It starts when you enter it — and clicking the disclosure triangle to expand its folder tree in place counts as entering, so that starts it too.
Entering a distribution for the first time, or a network location that has just come up, can take a few seconds to read. During that time the middle of the list area reads Loading… while the window stays draggable and clickable and you can switch to another tab — that read happens in the background and never freezes the interface.
Phones, cameras and other portable devices
An Android phone, an iPhone or a camera on a cable shows up as a portable device, with one row in the sidebar and one in This PC. Click it and you can browse it level by level.
Unlock the phone first and pick "File transfer" on it, or otherwise allow this computer access. Without that step the system itself sees no storage, and neither does tessoa.
Devices are read-only for now, and that guard rail is not finished. Dragging a file out of a device into another program is blocked, but Copy, Cut, Delete and Rename still appear in the right-click menu, and they are not greyed out. Choosing one has no result, and pasting elsewhere reports a failure. To copy photos onto your computer, use File Explorer for the time being.
The Size and Items columns inside a device stay on Not calculated and those numbers never arrive: walking a whole device recursively is not implemented yet. Automatic folder-size scanning does not run on a device either.
Three messages for an empty list
A device reads more slowly than a local disk, and "nothing here" can be three different things, so tessoa says which:
| The list area reads | What it means |
|---|---|
| This folder is empty | The folder really has nothing in it |
| The device returned nothing | The device was asked and answered with zero entries |
| Reading device… | Still reading; give it a moment |
The device returned nothing currently also covers one more case: when the device is connected but tessoa cannot bind to it, the result is identical to a genuinely empty folder. If you see it and you are sure there is something in there, confirm the permission prompt on the phone, then unplug and replug the cable.
Paths inside an iPhone are a poor thing to bookmark. The device identifier Windows gives an iPhone can change each time it is reconnected, and that identifier is exactly what the bookmark stores, so the bookmark then points nowhere. Android devices have a stable identifier and are unaffected.
Hiding a storage location
A partition you never use, or a WSL distribution you would rather not see, can be taken out of the lists:
- Right-click its row in the sidebar's Storage page, or its row in This PC.
- Click Hide.
It leaves the sidebar, This PC and the folder picker at once. To bring it back, open Settings → General → Visibility; the Storage items section at the bottom lists every storage location on the machine with a toggle each, where on means shown.
WSL distributions appear in the sidebar only; This PC does not list them, so hiding one has to be done from its sidebar row. Hiding it only stops the row being drawn; the distribution itself runs as before.