Launching explorer.exe with arguments just opens explorer.exe

Ok title might be a little misleading…

if you execute explorer "C:\Users" or something like this in CMD or another program calls it this way (i.e. Steam) It just opens regular explorer.exe and not Files even when the guide for making Files the default explorer is followed as intended

Expected behavior Files should open in the desired directory when executing explorer "Directory"

Logfile No logfile necessary

This is a small issue but quite annoying

[BanCrash]

This is so odd, I used your command but even with that still writing explorer.exe on cmd opens files.exe

I used the registry key to make files as default explorator, but I think this doesn’t happened before…

EDIT: Yep, using the other registry file to unset files solve the issue. My bad, sorry.

[JotaRata]

Nevermind I found the solution!

There’s no need to modify explorer.exe binaries, instead you can follow this guide to set an alias for explorer and set it to Files

First you need to include the path where Files.exe is located (C:\Users\NAME\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps) to PATH You create a bat or cmd file (ie Alias.bat) and save it somewhere, here you write:

@echo off set PATH=%PATH%;"C:\Users\NAME\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps" doskey explorer=files.exe $*

Now the bat file creates an “alias” for explorer, but this only last until the cmd window is closed that’s less than a second To make it persistent you need to create a new string keyword in the registry at:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Command Processor

with the name AutoRun and set the path to the bat file you created.

And that’s it! Now everytime you call explorer.exe form CMD using arguments it should open Files in the specified folder.

If you can add this guide somewhere it would be nice

Hello @JotaRata , I tried your solution but It doesn’t work for some programs that still launch explorer.exe. How can I unmade those changes? I tried restarting computer, but it doesn’t work.

I didn’t create the registry key, but the change seems to be permanent.

Regards and thanks.

It’s not permanent, the DOSKEY command is only active for the current session of CMD, if you close it, it’s gone. The AutoRun key In the registry only references the bat file you created, so in order to disable it just remove the file

Now if for some reason you still have explorer mapped to files.exe, just write

doskey explorer=explorer.exe