A utility to conveniently create a symbolic link for a file.

[KevinLi-py]

Description of the new feature / enhancement

Description

Allow users to create symlink for a file.

Triggering Methods

The user may use this utility in the following ways.

• Mannually open powertoy and select target and link path through dialogs
• Select Link to... from the right-click menu of target file.
• Select Link here... from the right-click menu of the folder where link should be put in.
• Select Link here from the right-click menu when drag-n-drop a file. (Like the image resizer)
• Select Create Link from the right-click menu of target file. This create a symbolic link in the same folder of the target. Then the user can move the link somewhere else by drag-n-drop. (Note: This is prepared for laptop users who use touchpad. It seems that you can't open right-click menu while drag-n-drop using touchpad)

Note

By default windows only allow administrator to create symbolic links. So this utility may check permissions and ask for administrator permissions when it started.

Scenario when this would be used?

Symbolic links are powerful approach to reuse files and reduce duplicates. Windows currently lack a gui approach to create symbolic link. Windows currently only allow create shortcut .lnk in gui. While .lnk shortcuts can be used to launch apps conveniently, they are techniquely regular files and they cannot replace original files in many scenarios. For example programs won't load .lnk shortcuts as a replacement of the original unless they are designed to process shortcuts. But if it's symlink instead it would be no problem.

Supporting information

Recently I was doing something about AI models. Many programs require that models being put in specific folder and I realized how troublesome it is to mannually create symlinks for these large model files in command line.

I think it won't be too difficult to implement this utility since we already have image resizer whose code could be used as reference.

[similar-issues-ai]

We've found some similar issues:

• mklink, symlinks #26607 , similarity score: 82%
• Symbolic link creation function #17887 , similarity score: 82%

If any of the above are duplicates, please consider closing this issue out and adding additional context in the original issue.

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