I’m a big fan of the “command prompt here” context menu extensions for Windows Explorer. I use them all the time. Sometimes, though, I need to go the other-way-around.

That is, I’m at a command prompt and I want Windows Explorer open at the current location of my prompt.

explorer %CD%

Pretty simple, but super helpful. I had one of those “man, I’m stupid”moments when I put two-and-two together on this.

I ended up making a little batch file “explore.bat” and stuck it in my path.

@echo off
echo Opening Explorer on %CD%
explorer %CD%

So now it’s just “explore” at the prompt and magic happens. (Yes, I do realize it’s only five characters shorter, but I also get a nice little echo message to tell me what’s going on, plus I don’t have to remember it anymore.)

Note you can get some slightly different functionality if you use some of the command line switches for Windows Explorer, but for me, this works.