Add mod: Hide Desktop Icon Text and Shortcut Arrows

[kivsak]

Provides options to hide desktop icon labels (keeping folder names) and remove the shortcut arrow overlay.

Features

• Hide Icon Text: Hides text labels for files and shortcuts on the desktop while preserving folder names.
• Hide Shortcut Arrows: Removes the standard shortcut arrow overlay from icons.
• Both features can be toggled independently via the mod settings.

Notes

• The shortcut arrow removal affects the entire running Explorer session because the overlay resides in the shared system image list.
• Disabling the shortcut arrow feature (or the mod itself) restores the arrows only after Explorer restarts or the icon cache refreshes.

Acknowledgments

• Huge thanks to @m417z! While this is a completely new mod, their desktop-icons-view mod provided the perfect boilerplate for the desktop SysListView32 window detection.

Known limitation

• Folder detection matches the drawn text against actual desktop folder names. If a file has exactly the same name as a folder on the desktop, that file's label will also be kept.

Changelog

If this pull request updates an existing mod, describe the changes below:

• Initial release (New mod with configurable settings)

Mod authorship

If this pull request introduces a new mod, please complete the section below.

This mod was created by @kivsak:

• The submitter, without AI assistance
• The submitter, with AI assistance
• Claude

Please select the options that best apply. Your selection does not affect the acceptance criteria, but it helps reviewers understand the context of the code and provide relevant feedback.

[m417z]

Submission review

Note: This review was done by Claude, and then refined manually. Due to the amount of submissions, doing a fully manual review for each pull request is no longer feasible. Thank you for understanding.

Thanks for the submission! I think adding an option for each feature would indeed be helpful. The items in the collapsed sections are optional, so it's your call whether to address them.

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1. Consider gating the arrow removal behind a setting (default off), or splitting it out. The mod bundles two unrelated tweaks (label hiding + arrow removal) with no ==WindhawkModSettings== block, so a user can't take just the reversible text-hiding without also getting the irreversible arrow change. Given the issue above, at minimum let users opt out of the arrow part; ideally the two are separate mods.

Optional improvements

Minor polish — none of this affects users, so it's your call.

• Trim unused @compilerOptions libraries. -luuid is linked even though the comment at the iidImageList GUID explicitly says it's defined locally to avoid depending on uuid.lib — drop -luuid. Also double-check -luxtheme and -lcomctl32: DrawThemeTextEx is resolved via GetProcAddress, the ListView_* calls are SendMessage macros, and SHGetImageList comes from shell32 via GetProcAddress — so those import libs may be unnecessary too. CI doesn't catch unused -l deps.
• @name "Ultimate Desktop Minimizer" is a bit grandiose for what the mod does; something descriptive like "Hide Desktop Icon Text and Shortcut Arrows" reads better in the catalog. Subjective.

Functionality notes

Non-critical observations about the feature behavior itself.

• The shortcut-arrow removal is not reversible. HideShortcutOverlay() rewrites the process-wide system image list (ReplaceIcon + SetOverlayImage) so the link-overlay slot points at a transparent image. A mod's effects must disappear when it's disabled — here they don't: as you note in the README, the arrow only comes back after Explorer restarts or the icon cache refreshes, because there's no way to read the original overlay image back. This also makes the change global to all of Explorer (every shortcut everywhere), not the desktop-only tweak the mod is presented as. The reversible way to do this is to hook the draw path and strip the overlay at render time instead of mutating shared state — e.g. hook IImageList::Draw / ImageList_DrawIndirect (comctl32) and clear the ILD_OVERLAYMASK bits / INDEXTOOVERLAYMASK(linkOverlay) from fStyle/dwFlags for the link overlay. That suppresses the arrow only while the mod is loaded and restores it instantly on unload, with no shared-state surgery.

Two consequences of the current approach that the same fix removes:

• Each load adds 5 transparent icons (one per SHIL_* size) to the system image list via ReplaceIcon(-1, …) and they're never removed, so enabling/disabling/updating the mod repeatedly leaks images into the shared list and permanently repoints the overlay slot.
• There's no Wh_ModUninit restoration for the overlay at all — only the subclass and a repaint.
• The label-hiding heuristic is string-matching, with caveats beyond the documented one. ShouldHideLabel keeps a label iff its drawn text is in the desktop folder-name set. Besides the file-named-like-a-folder collision you already document, this also: keeps a file label whenever it equals any folder's display name; hides any non-label text drawn during the desktop paint (e.g. group headers in grouped/Details views); and is sensitive to localization and to pre-truncated/ellipsized strings the listview might pass. Given that the DrawTextW/DrawThemeTextEx hook point has no per-item context, name-matching is about the only option — just flagging the breadth as FYI.
• WorkerW configurations aren't covered. IsDesktopFolderView/GetDesktopFolderView only recognize the FolderView whose top ancestor is Progman or GetShellWindow(). When a wallpaper slideshow (or some "active desktop" configs) reparents SHELLDLL_DefView under a WorkerW, detection fails and the mod won't apply. This is inherited from the desktop-icons-view boilerplate, so it may be acceptable, but worth knowing.
• UpdateFolderCache() runs a COM shell enumeration inside WM_PAINT (throttled to once/sec). On a slow desktop folder (e.g. a redirected/network home folder) the first paint after a change could briefly stutter. Throttling makes this mostly a non-issue.
• SHChangeNotify(SHCNE_ASSOCCHANGED, …) in Wh_ModAfterInit is a system-wide hammer that forces every shell icon to recompose, causing a brief icon flicker across Explorer on enable. Expected given the chosen arrow mechanism; would go away with the draw-path approach in item 1.

[kivsak]

Thank you for the detailed review and suggestions!

I have updated the mod to address the core feedback:

1. Added a ==WindhawkModSettings== block with separate toggles for hiding desktop text (hide_text) and removing shortcut arrows (hide_arrows). Now users can use them independently.
2. Renamed the mod to "Hide Desktop Icon Text and Shortcut Arrows" as requested.
3. Added the -lcomctl32 library back to compiler options to fix the subclassing linker errors.

Regarding the draw-path alternative for arrows and WorkerW edge cases — thank you for the insights! I will keep them in mind for future improvements.