Heres a summary of some of the things you can do.

Clipboard integration

Go to a directory in the clipboard.

If you have the address bar enabled in explorer:

Copy the location, go to the prompt and enter ‘pcd’ to go to that folder

Go to the location of a setting in netbeans or eclipse:

Copy the location , go to the prompt and enter ‘pcd’ to go to the folder (or folder containing the file).

Get the current directory without dragging:

Enter ‘ccd’

Directory bookmarks

dirsave and dirload let you save named bookmarks.

Using hotkeys

If you use the alternate shell 4nt (or the free TCC/LE) you can use the supplied configuration and aliases to access the bookmark functionality from the keyboard:

In the 4nt or tcc/le prompt enter “option”, under the “TCStart/TCExit” path, change the location to the location where batch-flow is installed + “\conf”, for instance on my computer batch-flow is installed to c:\usr\batch-flow, so I set it to

c:\usr\batch-flow\conf

Now in new TCC/LE prompts F5-F10 are reserved for directories: Ctrl+Fkey to save, and Alt+Fkey to load.  Alt-F12 lists these shortcuts.

Note:  Alt-F12 only lists shortcuts on FKeys, to list these and other shortcuts enter dirload /l

batch-flow comes with other handy hotkeys, use ‘alias’ in TCC/LE to see what they are.

Path manipulation

addpath

It’s annoying after installing a program to have to add it to the path, so there is an ‘addpath’ command to do this.

regpath

This is a more general utility for viewing the registry path, you can list it, validate it, check for the location of files within it.

Also useful is ‘regpath /L’ which sets the local prompts path to the one in the registry.

Further help

Most of the commands have help builtin, which you can access by using the /? option.

I’ve put up a few scripts I find useful in windows (download at the end of the article):

• addpath.js – Add a path to the registry path.
• dt.cmd – Change to desktop folder.
• e.cmd – Open explorer in current or specified folder.
• regpath.js  – Output the path stored in the registry.
• updateenvironment.js – Updates running apps with any changed settings in the registry.

And a couple that use python and pywin32:

• ccwd.py – Copy the current working directory to the clipboard
• cpath.py – Copy the current path to the clipboard

All of have acompanying batch files to run them, I generally have everything in a folder c:\usr\cmd, but they should work from anywhere in the path.

Download  cmd.zip

Colour Your folders with iColorFolder

IColorFolder gives folders a context menu which lets you change the colour.  Unfortunately this doesn’t work fully in Vista yet, and you’ll need to manually change the icon, navigate to Program Files\iColorFolder\iColorFolder.dll to get access to the folder icons.

Incidentally if you want have a shortcut to a folder, you can use the same workaround to use a coloured icon.

Colourise your commandline

Colour ls

It’s equally useful to have colour folders when using the commandline, to achieve this you can use msls from utools.

Download it and place it somewhere within the path (I use \usr\bin, which I added to the path earlier).

Now, to get colour directories you can type “ls –color”.  However it would be better to have that happen all the time.

To set color as the default, set the environment variable LS_OPTIONS to –color:

1. Press Windows+Pause,
2. Click through these buttons: Advanced, Environment Variables, New
3. Set the name as LS_OPTIONS and the variable to –color

Next time you launch the commandline and type ls, it will be in colour.  You can also combine options here, for instance if you want -l to be default as well.

Using 4NT/TCC-LE

Another way of getting colour directories is to use 4/NT or TakeCommand-LE (The free cut down version) from JPSoft.  This replaces the whole command shell and has many enhancements that help day-to-day.

Once you’ve downloaded the shell, if you want to change colours for particular kinds of files, then type option, go to the windows tab, and you can set directory colours.

To set EXE CMD and BAT files to be bright white enter:

EXE,CMD,BAT:15

If you want bright white on blue enter

EXE,CMD,BAT:15,1

Semicolons seperate file types – here I’ve set executables yellow and documents white:

EXE,CMD,BAT:14;TXT,DOC,PDF:15

The colours are arranged foreground, background and can be any of the ones used below (note background only has 8 colours to choose from, while foreground has 16, the last being the brighter versions).

Note:  These are the default textmode colours, if you change the command prompt colours yours may be different.

Tango in putty

The tango project is a usability project for free software, the colours are very pleasing and have been ported to putty, alternatively the Igvita theme is nice.

The tango port comes with the bitstream vera mono fonts too, so everything should look pretty good once installed.

Colourise your browser

If you use firefox you can install ColourfulTabs which makes it easier to find that tab among the crowd (especially useful if like me, you have lots open).

Colourise gmail (sometimes)

This one is a little annoying as it seems to be broken, but I’ll include it anyway in case it gets fixed.

If you install greasemonkey and the gmail colouriser, then all your gmail will be coloured by label (for instance I have a label for mailing lists I subscribe to).      When the gmail colouriser is working this works great for finding certain kinds of mail in the long list.

Unfortunately this isn’t working for me at the moment, so no screenshot… if I knew how to debug greasemonkey scripts I might have a look at fixing this as it’s so useful – it seems to choke on certain mail names but I’m not sure what they are.