TL;DR: don’t bother clicking your way through the Windows File Explorer, use bash functions instead! :)

I’ve already blogged in quite some length about my current Windows dev environment and I’ve put enough emphasis on the fact that bash is at the center of my workflow, together with my bash profile & more recently with ConEMU.

I continually improve my bash profile as I discover new things I can do with it, and this post is in that vein.

I often find myself opening the Windows File Explorer (Win + e) to get at some location; for that purpose, I simply pin the often used locations in the ‘Quick access’ list, although that means that I have to go the ‘click-click-click-click’ route and as we know, one can be much more efficient using only the keyboard.

To quickly open the File Explorer at locations I often need to open (e.g., my downloads folder, my movies folder & whatnot), I’ve created the following utility function & aliases:

# Aliases to open the Windows File Explorer at the current location alias explore='explorer .' # open file explorer here alias e='explore' alias E='explore' # Open File Explorer at the given location # The location can be a path or UNC (with / rather than \) # Examples # openFileExplorerAt //192.168.0.1/downloads # openFileExplorerAt /c/downloads # openFileExplorerAt c:/downloads openFileExplorerAt(){ pushd $1 explore popd }

The ‘explore’ alias simply opens the Windows File Explorer at the current shell location while the ‘openFileExplorerAt’ function goes to the path given in argument and opens the File Explorer before going back to the previous shell location.

With the above, I’m able to define functions such as the one below that opens my downloads folder directly:

downloads(){ openFileExplorerAt //nas.tnt.local/downloads }

And since i’m THAT lazy, I just alias that to ‘dl’ ^^.

That’s it! :)