These might be handy.
lehnerus2000
Last week the blogosphere went temporarily insane over a simple GUID that displays a list of Control Panel shortcuts. It’s not even close to deserving the “God mode” label, but I’m still hearing about it. As I noted in response, that’s only one of 39 GUID shortcuts available in Windows 7. But even those are esoteric and mostly of interest to programmers and geeks.
But there’s another, much larger class of well-hidden Windows shortcuts that are useful to everyone, not just techies. I dug through my notes for Windows 7 Inside Out and found a treasure trove of information about these shortcuts. They wound up on the cutting-room floor for that first edition, but are scheduled to be in the expanded second edition in a year or so.
The shortcuts I’m referring to involve the shell command, which is curiously undocumented in the Windows 7 Help files or on Microsoft’s web site. The idea is to give Windows programs and users access to common locations using the Windows shell, Windows Explorer. The syntax is simple—you type shell, followed by a colon and the name of the shell folder location. That list of folder locations is hard to memorize, with lots of inconsistencies especially in regard to spacing. For example, the shell shortcut for the shared Downloads folder is shell:CommonDownloads, whereas the equivalent shortcut to the shared Documents folder is shell:Common Documents. And the command will not tolerate typos. If you add a space in the former or leave out the space in the latter, the shortcuts won’t work. The good news is that these commands are not case-sensitive, so you can ignore the sometimes odd capitalization.
Despite the syntactic challenges, these shortcuts are very useful for some tasks. They’re especially good for fast typists who don’t want to move their hands from the keyboard to do a bunch of mouse movements. If that’s you, tap the Windows key to open the Start menu with the insertion point already positioned in the Search box. Then type shell: followed by the location.
I’ve broken the full list of 94 shortcuts into four groups, each with its own page. If you want to dive right in, here are the links to click. But I suggest you keep reading for some examples of shortcuts that I find worth memorizing.
Note that many, but not all, of these shortcuts work with Windows Vista, and a smaller subset work with Windows XP. For this post I assume you’re using Windows 7.
- Page 2: Folders from current user profiles Use these Shell shortcuts for fast access to data stores in the currently logged-on user profile and the shared Public user profile.
- Page 3: Other interesting per-user folders These shell: commands help you get to collections of user data outside of your visible user profile.
- Page 4: Virtual folders and Control Panel shortcuts Windows Explorer is capable of displaying all sorts of data from folders that can’t be reached by starting at a drive letter.
- Page 5: System and per-machine folders These locations contain data that is available to every user.
The following list includes my favorite Windows shell shortcuts, those that I use regularly:
shell:Profile
This opens your user profile folder (on a default installation, you’ll find this at c:\users\username). You can get the same results by clicking your account name at the top of the Start menu’s right column. This location is also accessible via the environment variable %userprofile%.
shell:Personal
Typing this command takes you straight to the Documents folder in your user profile. You can reach the same destination by clicking the Documents shortcut on the Start menu’s right column.
shell:SendTo
This one solves a real usability problem for Windows users who are used to running with hidden files visible. If you look in your user profile folder, you’ll see a normally hidden SendTo shortcut. But clicking that shortcut displays this error message:
That’s because this shortcut is actually a junction, created for backwards compatibility. The real SendTo folder is several subfolders deep in your profile’s hidden AppData folder. After you use the shell command to open this file, you can add shortcuts that appear on the Send To menu when you right-click a file or folder. Add a shortcut to your favorite text or hex editor and you can view any file by sending it to that shortcut with a right-click.
shell:Public
Use this command to open the default collection of shared folders on your machine. If you use Homegroups, these folders act as dropboxes for shared libraries on your system, and this is an easy way to see (and search) their contents in one window.
shell:Common Startup and shell:Startup
Which shortcuts are loaded automatically when you start Windows? Program installers often create a shortcut that run automatically at startup. Some even offer the choice of running for just your account or for all users. You’ll find these shortcuts in two separate Startup folders, one buried deep in the hidden AppData folder of your user profile, the other in the hidden ProgramData folder, which is in the root of your system drive.
shell:ConnectionsFolder
This might not be the most elegant way to get to the Network Connections folder, but it’s definitely faster than the official path. Without this trick, you have to stumble to the Network and Sharing Center, then click Change Adapter Settings in the navigation pane.
shell:Programs and shell:Common Programs
These two folders (from your personal profile and the ProgramData folder, respectively) combine to create the All Programs list on your Start Menu. The mouse-driven alternative is to click the Start menu, right-click All Programs, and choose Open (for your profile) or Open All Users (for the much more densely populated list available to any user account).
shell:AppData and shell:Local AppData
These shortcuts open the Roaming Application Data and Local Application Data folders, respectively. In everyday use, you don’t need (or event want) access to these folders, but knowing their whereabouts is handy when you want to work directly with saved settings for a program. You’ll find Firefox and Thunderbird user profiles here, and most e-mail programs (including Outlook and Windows Live Mail) store the files containing saved messages and contacts here as well.
shell:Cookies and shell:cache
These shortcuts are, without question, the fastest way to see information saved by Internet Explorer. The first shortcut lets you inspect and manage saved cookies; the second opens the Temporary Internet Files folder. The alternative involves much spelunking through the Internet Options dialog box and is not recommended for long-term sanity.
Want to see the entire list? Click that link below.
