Here’s a grab bag of ways to make better use of Explorer.
There are plenty of small ways you can hack Explorer to make your computing life more productive—for example, by hacking the right-click shortcut menu. Try out these hacks and see.
When you right-click a file in Explorer, you get a shortcut menu that includes a list of programs with which you can open the file. But the programs you want to open those files might not always be on the shortcut menu. It’s easy to add new programs to that list. Let’s say you want to add a shortcut menu item that allows .gif files to be opened with the freeware graphics viewer IrfanView [Hack #99] . From Windows Explorer, choose Tools → Folder Options → File Types. In the Registered File Types list, select the file type for which you want to add a new shortcut menu item. In our example, we’ll choose a GIF file. After this hack, any time you click a file of this type, you’ll get a new choice to open the file with.