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Comment by philo23 | Hacker News Reader

There's actually an option in Settings to swap between Powershell and cmd.exe in the Win + X menu.

On top of that you can actually go in and customise it quite a bit to your own liking as it's just a folder inside your local app data: C:\Users\YourWindowsUsername\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WinX

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Unfortunately it has no effect on the menu in Windows Explorer which also dropped cmd for PowerShell recently.

You can add a right-click "Console Here" menu item yourself. It's one of the things I've done on fresh installs of Windows since 95.

    HKCR\*\shell\Console Here\command
    Default="%WINDIR%\system32\cmd.exe"

    HKCR\Directory\shell\Console Here\command
    Default="%WINDIR%\system32\cmd.exe /k cd %1"

I tend not to use the file menu in Windows Explorer, but yeah it'd be nice if that option swapped it there too.

I found out recently you can just type "cmd" in the Explorer address bar and hit enter and it'll open cmd.exe to the current directory, so long as you're not in a special shell folder or an unmapped network share. That's saved me a bunch of time.

I didn't know that. I usually just hit "ctrl + r" and then type in "cmd" and press "enter" and then navigate to the directory I want with "cd".

Your pointer will save me time.

I believe it should work with any executable in your PATH but I've never tried it with anything beyond cmd.exe to be honest.

Additional tip: use Cntl+L to get to Windows Explorer address bar, type cmd, enter.

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