Windows network drives

Opening a UNC path — \\server\share, or an RDP-redirected drive such as \\tsclient\C\... — keeps fman responsive, and fills the listing in far fewer network round trips than a plain file-by-file walk would.

What to expect on a share

• Both panes stay responsive while a share is open, not just the one showing it.
• Hidden files behave exactly as they do locally. On Windows, hidden-ness comes from the file attribute alone — there is no dot-prefix rule — so .gitignore stays visible and Git's hidden .git folder stays hidden.
• A row that cannot be loaded is tried once, not retried forever. Use Reload or Refresh to try it again.
• Files on a network path get a generic icon per file extension rather than the real icon read out of each file. Local paths are unaffected.

Getting real icons back on network drives

Run Toggle network drive icons from the command palette — it is also listed as Show real icons on network drives. It flips the setting, reloads both panes, and persists across restarts.

The setting lives in Core Settings.json:

{
  "network_file_icons": true
}

The default is false, meaning generic icons. Expect slower, per-file behaviour on high-latency shares while it is turned on: real icons for files like .exe and .dll are stored inside the file, so showing them means reading every file over the wire.

The Network… entry in the drive list

Everything above is about UNC paths. The Network… entry in the drive list is a separate thing — it browses the list of servers and shares Windows knows about.

• Listing the network no longer opens every server it finds. It lists servers, and their shares one level down, without connecting to them. Before, a single unreachable machine could hold up the whole list for seconds.
• Rows appear while the folder is still being read. A listing that takes longer than half a second starts showing what it has so far instead of waiting for the whole enumeration. Fast local folders are unchanged — they finish before the first flush.
• A slow pane tells you it is working. After a short delay the pane paints a message in its centre with a seconds counter that keeps ticking, so a slow listing never looks like a frozen application.

On a Network… pane the message names what it is waiting for:

Searching network shares…

Waiting for Windows to return the network browse list (14 s).
A machine that is switched off or unreachable can hold this up.

Everywhere else — including all of macOS and Linux — you get the generic form:

Loading…

Still reading this folder (2 s).

The Network… entry is Windows-only. On macOS and Linux a mounted SMB share is an ordinary local path (/Volumes/..., /mnt/...), so a slow one shows the generic message.