Windows Explorer tip: Cmd here, because Open Command Window Here is not awesome enough in Off Topic

ID:34902
 
Sep 17 2007, 2:46 am
In the spirit of Explore here, here's another registry hack from yours truly: Cmd here. This hack adds a "Cmd here" option to the context menu of all files. When chosen, it opens a command-line window in the same directory as that file. And it sets the title of the window to be the directory name, because I can. (And because having half a dozen console windows open and not being able to see which is which by looking at the title gets old fast.)

It even works on shortcuts: Right-click on your Firefox icon and choose Cmd here to instantly get a command-line window with the current directory set to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox (or wherever you installed it). Smooth.

To install Cmd here, simply download this .reg file and double-click it to merge the contents into your registry. It's plain-text, so if you're interested to see how it works you can open it up.

Or, you can look here. Check out this monster of a command!

cmd /S /k "for /f "delims=" %%i in ("%1") do @title %~di%~pi"

Admittedly most of it is completely unnecessary; cmd /k will do the job just fine (or even cmd if you don't mind having Microsoft's copyright notice in your face all the time), just without the window title being changed. But hey, I need to make sure my l33t batch file skilz don't go to waste somehow.

This probably only works on reasonably recent Windows versions; it's been tested on XP, and should work on NT 4.0 and 2000 as well. But if you're still using 98, give it up already. ;-)

Why did I make this? Well, I have the Open Command Window Here extension installed, and it works fine. But I kept wanting to open a command window in the same directory as my Explorer window, without having to show the Folders pane or go up a folder. Now I just need to right-click on a file instead of a folder, and away I go.

Total waste of time, since I hardly ever visit Windows anyway these days and will thus hardly ever use this... but I can't resist a spot of registry hacking.
#1 Sep 17 2007, 3:30 am
I like having things like this since we have windows 98 installed on one of our PCs and it has the irritating habit of hiding file extensions so I often have to go into the command prompt to change them (although normally I juts write a batch file instead of navigating all the way to the folder, which is effort).
#2 Sep 17 2007, 5:58 am
I'm getting quite comfortable in Linux myself. I wiped my Windows partition on my laptop, to run just Ubuntu(Which I keep in a very portable format so I can upgrade constantly, and it's far easier to do that in Linux than Windows), My main desktop is forced into Windows for one simple reason, video games.

As for your little "Cmd here" trick, that's nice. I might download it and see if I can't turn it into "Browse Here" for shortcuts. I rather hate having to right click a shortcut, then go to properties, then find target, just to get to a program's install folder.
#3 Sep 17 2007, 10:30 am
Bless you for this. I'm sick and tired of all these supposed "Open a command window wherever you like" things requiring you to only work on a subfolder, not on the current folder. The latter is obviously what I always want, whereas the former is marginally useful at best.
#4 Sep 17 2007, 1:45 pm
Thanks a million, Chris P. Just two days ago I was doing batch conversion of GIF->PNG and continually had to go up a folder to run the Open Command Window Here extension for the command line gif2png program.

All of this new batch language syntax that Microsoft invented for Windows NT is a real pain in the ass, though. I have to re-learn everything.
#5 Sep 18 2007, 12:41 am
I'm surprised but pleased y'all found it useful. Maybe that wasn't such a waste of time after all!

@Danial.Beta: Check out the Explore Here hack I linked to in the blog post. That does almost what you want, though if you don't want the Folders pane open by default you'll need to tweak it a little.

I too use Linux pretty much exclusively these days. I love the Linux command line, it's just perfect for a programmer/power-user like myself. Completely useless and confusing for most people, of course...

@Jtgibson: Yeah, it's pretty wacky. On the plus side, though, it means batch files are actually useful!

By the way, here's a mostly-useless little trick I found while trawling the web putting together that crazy command: set /a 2+2 will output 4. You can do other 32-bit integer arithmetic with it too, and set can do some other handy tricks as well. Run set /? for the info. for /? also has a lot of useful functionality; it's the only way I've found to get functionality similar to Linux's backticks using Windows batch files.