Banishing Windows Explorer

So you love your new Explorer replacement and can’t stop telling your friends about it. Problem – you also love your keyboard shortcuts, especially Win+E. Except every time you hit Win+E, Windows Explorer shows its ugly face again – boo!

If you are lucky, your Explorer replacement has the option to “replace Windows Explorer”. That essentially means all calls to Explorer are trapped by your new File Manager and thus Win+E does not drop you back into Explorer-hell.

If you aren’t that lucky ((or like me, want to avoid messing with your work laptop as much as possible)), there isn’t an obvious answer. The best way to fix this is to use Autohotkey.

AHK can be setup to recognize keyboard shortcuts using the Windows key – so for example, I have a script that launches Dopus when I hit Win+E. This isn’t a perfect solution – I usually have to hit Win+E atleast twice before Dopus launches, but once it’s running, I usually don’t have to worry about launching another File Manager window thanks to tabbed windows 🙂