Having grown up with DOS and Unix-based environments, I’m rather comfortable with the command line – to the point I often find it much faster to accomplish many tasks in than a traditional graphical interface. No matter my allegiance to the command line, I’m not stubborn enough to remain committed to the method when something is just more efficient with a mouse and a few point and clicks.

Have you ever found yourself in the middle of process in a command prompt only to realize it’s not the correct tool? Stopping, switching to Windows Explorer, and finally navigating to your working directory seems to be counter-productive to your desire for increased efficiency.

If this scenario sounds familiar then this quick tip may be of aid!

To open a Windows Explorer window and switch to the current working directory from your Command Prompt use the command explorer .

Then continue your work-flow in Explorer.

This tip actually works across platforms too – assuming you know the appropriate file explorer binary.

• Gnome in Linux: nautilus .
• OS X: open .