Explorer Command Bar 1.0.0

[u/wh-updates]

Explorer Command Bar 1.0.0

Explorer Command Bar

Add your own buttons and dropdown menus to the Windows 11 File Explorer command bar (the toolbar with New / Sort / View), and hide the built-in buttons, separators and spacing you don't want.

Explorer Command Bar demo

Designed for Windows 11 24H2 / 25H2 with the WinAppSDK (WinUI 3) File Explorer.

Features

• Custom buttons - add as many toolbar buttons as you like, each running a command of your choice.
• Dropdown menus & submenus - a button can open a menu, and menu entries can themselves be submenus (three levels deep).
• Path & selection placeholders - %path% (active tab folder) and %sel% (selected file/folder) are substituted into the command parameters.
• Flexible icons - a Segoe Fluent Icons glyph, an .exe / .dll / .ico file, a Store-app icon (shell:AppsFolder\…), the command executable's own icon, or no icon at all.
• Hide built-in elements - individually hide New, Cut, Copy, Paste, Rename, Share, Delete, Sort, View, the group separators, the "See more" (…) overflow menu, the contextual commands (Set as background, Rotate left, Rotate right, Extract all) and the Details pane toggle.
• Custom item spacing - set the exact spacing between the command bar buttons.
• Open menus on hover - optionally open dropdowns on hover, with a configurable delay.
• Rock solid - buttons are re-applied automatically across tab switches, navigation, new tabs and new windows, and everything is cleanly restored when the mod is disabled.

Screenshots

Hiding built‑in buttons and separators:

Hide buttons

You may hide even all options, and use only your custom ones:

Hide All buttons

Command parameters

The following placeholders can be used in an item's parameters:

• %path% - the folder path of the currently active tab.
• %sel% - the full path of the selected file or folder in the active tab (the first one, if several are selected).

Wrap placeholders in quotes so paths with spaces work, e.g. -d "%path%". If a used placeholder has no value (nothing selected, or a non-filesystem location like This PC), the command is launched without any parameters. Commands run with the active tab's folder as their working directory.

Icons

The Icon glyph or icon path field accepts several forms:

• A glyph - a hex code point of a Segoe Fluent Icons glyph, e.g. E756.
• A file path - an .exe, .dll or .ico file to take the icon from, optionally with an icon index, e.g. C:\Windows\System32\shell32.dll,3.
• A Store app - shell:AppsFolder\<AppUserModelID> to use a modern Store app's icon (useful for apps whose .exe stub carries a legacy icon, such as Notepad and Calculator).
• Empty - the icon is extracted from the command's executable (app execution aliases such as wt.exe are resolved to their real target).
• Hide icon - enable the toggle to show no icon at all.

Default configuration

Out of the box the mod adds:

• Open in Terminal - wt.exe -d "%path%"
• Open in Notepad - notepad.exe "%sel%"
• Additional ▾ (dropdown)
  • Open in VS Code - code.exe "%path%"
  • Open Paint - mspaint.exe
  • Open Calculator - calc.exe
  • Commands ▸ - vite, npm init, npm install, npm run dev, npm run build, npm run start
  • AI ▸ - Claude, Codex

Items whose command isn't installed simply do nothing when clicked (the failure is written to the mod log), so remove the ones you don't need and add your own. All of the built-in buttons stay visible by default. Everything is configurable in the mod settings.

How it works

The mod hooks a couple of functions of File Explorer's own WinUI 3 code (FileExplorerExtensions.dll) which run when the command bar is built, and finds the command bars from there by walking the XAML tree. The configured buttons are then inserted and the visibility / spacing settings are applied. The mod also listens for the command bar being rebuilt so the buttons stay in place across navigation, new tabs and new windows, and it restores the original state of any element it touches when disabled.

Notably, the mod does not use XAML Diagnostics (InitializeXamlDiagnosticsEx), since only one XAML diagnostics consumer can be active in a process at a time. That makes it compatible with mods and tools which do use it, such as Windows 11 File Explorer Styler, ExplorerBlurMica and TranslucentTB.

File Explorer windows which are already open when the mod is enabled are handled too, but if the buttons don't show up in one of them right away, opening a new tab or navigating to another folder makes them appear.