One of the most common complaints about the Explorer interface in Windows 7 was that it dumped the ‘up’ button used to move up in the directory structure. The good news is that it’s returning in Windows 8. The perhaps more controversial news is that Microsoft will achieve that by using the often controversial Ribbon interface. More »
Anyone can sit down at a Windows PC and get along fine, but with the right tips and tricks, you can get around much faster. Here’s a handful of clever tricks to boost your Windows skills (and show off to friends). More »
Windows only: Explorer’s integrated search is fine for most things, but more powerful searches or sorting through long lists of similar files isn’t exactly easy — Listary gives you hotkeys, wildcards and commands to help you quickly find anything in a folder. More »
Windows might have some fancy tricks up its sleeve, but easily generating a list of files in a given directory isn’t one of them. For that, your best bet is heading back to a good old-fashioned DOS prompt. More »
If you’ve ever wanted to combine the contents of two directories, you don’t have to copy/paste them together—Windows 7 or Vista will let you merge them easily. More »
Windows only: Have you ever told a little white lie about when you started working on a project, hoping nobody would notice that the file timestamps disagree? SKTimeStamp helps you lie more effectively. More »
Dear Lifehacker, I want to be able to right-click a file in Windows explorer, hit “Send to Gmail”, and automatically attach the file to a new email. Is this possible? Sincerely, Gmailer More »
Windows only: Free file browser Q-Dir makes for a good USB drive app or installed replacement for Windows Explorer for those who do a serious amount of file swapping, or just like to be able to keep multiple folder views open at once. The app—which installs by default, but can run by itself after renaming it “Q-Dir.exe”—offers a customisable number of panes, though the default four-square is a pretty good starting point. You can save any view you like to a favourite button, along with adding shortcuts to frequently-accessed folders. There’s also a quick-filter box in the lower-right for easy sorting and finding, and if you use Q-Dir regularly, you’ll be glad it keeps your right-click shell extensions and offers its own “*Q-Dir” launch option on right-clicking a folder. Q-Dir is a free download for Windows systems only. Q-Dir [via FreewareGenius.com]
Windows only: Reader Juliana created a simple but extremely useful AutoHotkey script that creates a new folder in Explorer with a quick keystroke of Ctrl+N. If you’re an AHK user, you can download the script source here and just copy and paste it into your own AHK script. (This is a great compliment to the Better Rename script, for example, which brings Vista-style renaming to XP.) If you’re not an AHK user, you can still add the shortcut sugar to Explorer by downloading the executable (linked below). It may not change your life, but if you’re a shortcut lover, it certainly adds a much-needed feature to Explorer. New-Folder [Mediafire]
Windows only: Attribute Changer, a free right-click utility, gives you total control over everything reported by a file to your system. Right-click one or many files and choose “Change Attributes,” and you can enable or disable read-only status, hiding, indexing, and even NTFS compression. You can change the file’s date of creation, modification and last access, and tweak a photo’s time of taking. Great for those files that get erroneously labelled as made on Jan. 1, 1969, and always get lost in searches, or fixing date issues with a photo collection. Attribute Changer is a free download for Windows systems only. Attribute Changer [Romain Petges via gHacks]
