From The Tips Box: Command Prompt Searches, Tab Transparency

Readers offer their best tips for searching through folders from the command prompt, making some UI tweaks in Firefox’s tab bar, and creating custom text characters in Windows.

About the Tips Box: Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips in our inbox, but for various reasons—maybe they’re a bit too niche, maybe we couldn’t find a good way to present it, or maybe we just couldn’t fit it in—the tip didn’t make the front page. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favourites for your buffet-style consumption. Got a tip of your own to share? Email it to tips at lifehacker.com.au.

Cycle Through Files of a Certain Type in Windows’ Command Prompt

PrairieMoon shares a neat command line tip for Windows:

In a Windows Command Prompt window, go to a directory, any directory where you know that a certain file type exists, whether in abundance or not. E.g. EXE files.

Type:

*.exe

But don’t press the spacebar after that, hit TAB instead. It’ll cycle through all EXEs in that folder, in alphabetical order. Shift+TAB will go the other way.

You can also use partial names, (like cl*.exe) to cycle through names of EXEs beginning with the letters cl.

There are likely more possibilities but I haven’t gotten to them yet.

Make Firefox 4’s Tab and Address Bar Transparent in Windows

If you like the look of Aero Glass and want more of it in Firefox’s new “tabs on top” format, Я Ξ √ Ω L U T ↑ ☼ N $ shows us how:

Make Firefox 4’s Address Bar [and even all the tabs]glass. Just add the following code to userchrome.css:

#nav-bar
{
background-color:transparent !important;
}

tab:not([selected=”true”] ){background:transparent !important;}

.tabs-newtab-button {background:transparent !important;}

tab:not([selected=”true”] ) .tab-text{text-shadow: 0px 0px 5px white, 0px 0px 5px white, 0px 0px 5px white !important; color:black !important; font-weight:bold !important;}

In theory, this is supposed to keep the current tab opaque, which could actually be a nice little productivity booster, keeping you focused on the tab at hand and making the others blend into the background. This didn’t work as intended for me in the latest beta, but it’s still a cool looking UI tweak. [via the about:config blog on Tumblr]

Create Custom Text Characters in Windows with Eudcedit

Java-Princess tips us off to a Windows utility for creating custom characters:

I had a need to use this Windows 95 app today and I was surprised to see it was still around on W7! eudcedit.exe—it’s in the System32 folder. It lets you design your own characters for insertion using the special characters in Word 2010 or the Alt key method. You can just type its name in the start menu search and it will be located.