different icons for .do and .dta files

[Jeremy Reynolds]

Dear Stata experts,
I installed Stata 19 on a laptop running Windows 11, and although everything seems to be working properly, I found that the icons for the different file types (e.g., .do .dta) are the same. They icons for each file type is unique on my desktop.
I tried re-setting the file associations at Edit/Preferences, but that did not fix the problem.
Does anyone know how to fix this?

Thanks,

Jeremy

[Dirk Enzmann]

This is no answer to your question. But your question about icons indicates to me that you are using (selecting, searching, ...) files based on the icon view of files (the default in Windows) -- but I may be wrong. Even if I am wrong, it may be that you or others find the following helpful.

It may be useful to you to consider a different way of working with files. I would recommend to forget the Windows file explorer and use a program that allows to work with a display of files (full names, i.e. names and extensions) in two windows, allows to set "bookmarks" (even hierarchically) to navigate to folders, etc. (e.g. the possibility to compare text files line by line). For example, I am using the Total Commander (shareware: Free if you accept a minor threshold each time you start it, but not expensive to buy). Here icons are far less important because you can always focus on the file extension. I configured it to automatically start with Windows and this is my main place to work with files (I very rarely use the Windows Desktop).

Here two links, one (unfortunately for Windows 10 but it should also work similarly for Windows 11) demonstrating how to change the Windows file manager's default to show always the full information of files (name, extension, size, date, properties): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m58rkfVRDlc. [BTW: Here a similar thing for Mac users: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVC9i6zP8L0&t=2s.]

But if you would use the Total Commander (for Windows) you don't need that anymore. It takes about half a day to get accustomed and I believe it will pay off: https://www.ghisler.com/download.htm. [BTW: For Linux users the equivalent is Krusader: https://krusader.org/index.html]

I hope it may be helpful to some.