In short, it’s because our app isn’t a light weight utility, but a powerful tool. If you’re just looking for something simple (super fast loading, 16 colors), head to Github to download kweatherman’s Folcolor for free.

None of the other apps do exactly what our app does from a technical perspective. We’re forcing your light or dark theme as per your system settings on a Win32 app, which isn’t natively supported by Windows in .NET Framework 4.8. This alone requires a great deal of graphics and CPU capability. Some of the other apps hard coded their dark mode (admittedly with good results, because their apps isn’t nearly as comprehensive as ours!), but our team decided against this as a long term solution.

(Microsoft is working to support dark mode for Win32 natively – see here. We are waiting to see what Microsoft’s final dark mode implementation in .NET 10 looks like. As of now, it’s too rough around the edges compared to what we’re already doing in Windows 11 Folder Color Changer).

Secondly, we’re hooking up to the new Windows Explorer context menu in Windows 11, which in and of itself runs slower than previous versions. Many of the other apps in this category add a set of context menu items to the “old” Windows Explorer context menu, which admittedly is extremely useful, but this also lets them avoid the technical limitations of doing the same for the “new” context menu, and requires their users to open the “Show more options” sub menu.

We looked at other (highly performant) options like GitHub – ChGen/DarkEnforcer: Win32 Dark Mode enforcer but that’s simply not what we’re looking for in a premium product. 

To help combat this performance drawback, we recommend enabling hotkeys under Options. This lets you nearly instantly run the app using hotkeys instead of launching the app from the context menu or otherwise, as the app is left running in suspended mode. This means you only need to start and wait out launching our app once.

While we recommend waiting out our app, you can also boost performance of the app by around 1-2 seconds depending on your system configuration by disabling the theme under Options.

As a rough indication: On a Pentium with 8gb of memory, the app will take between 8 and 12 seconds to launch under optimal conditions. On a Ryzen 7 with 64gb of memory, the app will take between 3 and 6 seconds to launch under optimal conditions.

The app should typically run similar to other more advanced apps such as Photoshop on your computer.

All in all, our features are absolutely worth the waiting time if you’re interested in perfection, precision and detail. 🙂