Windows Run dialog

On Windows, most often you run an application by finding and double-clicking it’s .exe file. What a lot of people don’t realise is that you can launch any application or open any file you want by typing a single command. That can be achieved inside the Run dialog.

Opening the Run dialog

To open the Run dialog, you can either:

A) Press Win + R key combination

or

B) Right click on the Windows menu, and then press Run

Commands

Folders

You can open any folder by typing in it’s full path. So, if you have a folder named Work inside your Documents folder, the full path will be something like C:\Users\John\Documents\Work\.

If your desired folder is directly in your account folder, so Desktop, Documents, Pictures, etc. you can just type in the name of the folder. For example, if you want to open your Pictures folder, just type in pictures and it will be opened.

There are, of course, some more special location, some of which are:

Bonus: %appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu will open the Start Menu folder, from which you can edit what goes inside your start menu.

Programs

You can always run any application by typing in it’s full path. So, to launch something like FireFox, you’ll need to type in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe.

But, whats more important is that you can more easily launch some Windows apps, like Calculator or Control Panel. Here is a list of commands and the application they launch:

* The shutdown command requires parameters:

• /s will shutdown in one minute
• /r will restart in one minute
• /t specifies after what amount of time to shutdown or restart (a number needs to be entered afterwards, so /t 0 for immediate execution)
• /f forces running applications to close (might result in data loss!)

Windows settings

There are also many “shortcuts” to different Windows settings windows. Those include:

Note: cpl stands for Control Panel Item and msc stands for Microsoft System Configuration.

For more

For more commands, check out windowsruncommands.com. They have a much bigger list of commands and shortcuts you can use.