Command Prompt Explorer Bar

OK, I admit it. I’m an old time command line junkie. Starting out in the old DOS days I still find it faster to do some tasks by pulling up a command window and

This is a tool that’s been around for a while, but I find few people know about. Have you ever been in an explorer window and wished you had a command prompt that you could easily cut and paste between? Command Prompt Explorer Bar is your answer.

Available at http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/CommandBar.asp this tool has some cool features. After you install, open a new explorer window. Then hit Ctrl+M or select View, Explorer Bar, Command Prompt from the menu.

Down the left side are some handy short cut icons.

The top icon gives you the standard edit tools you’d have under a normal command window.

The second icon, the little green arrow, is the Synchronize command. If you’ve CD’d around, and want to quickly get back to the same folder as what are displaying in the upper half of the explorer window, just click the Synchronize tool.

The next tool, the one that looks like a blank window, is the CLS command. For those of you who are not a command line junkies, CLS stands for CLear Screen, and basically wipes the display.

The button with green text is the “Get selected items” button. If you highlight one or more files / folders in the upper half of the explorer window, pressing this button copies the file / folder names to the command line. Very useful for passing files to batch jobs.

The fifth icon down looks like a yellow bent arrow is the enter command. Clicking it is just the same as hitting the enter key on your keyboard.

The next item is the ESC key command, it’s the one with red text. Like the enter button, this is the same as pressing the escape key on the keyboard. A lot of older command line programs use escape to exit their program.

The seventh button is a menu that will paste in popular commands, such as “cd..”. Note that it has some shortcuts for .Net. However, this app was last updated in 2002, so don’t expect these to work with VS 2005. However the source code is available for download, so perhaps someone will update this feature.

The bottom two buttons will expand and contract the width of the command window.

There you go, a cool free tool to help out all us old command line addicts.