Take the 2-minute tour ×

On the Windows Vista taskbar, you can middle-click an icon to open a new instance of a program. In a Windows Vista explorer window address bar (the thing that shows the current file path as a bunch of clickable folders seperated by arrows,) you should be able to middle-click a folder and open a new window there. Is there anyway I could write code to modify Windows to do this?

share|improve this question
In your question, do you mean Windows 7, rather than Vista? –  sblair Oct 27 '09 at 14:22
Since this is about writing code, move to stackoverflow? –  Chris Dwyer Oct 27 '09 at 14:39
In my opinion, it's unlikely that a "piece of code" would modify such core behavior from the Windows Explorer. You don't have access to the sources, you can't "compile your own Windows Explorer". I don't think as well it is opened to "plugins" (at least for something like the address bar). In the end, I doubt that your request is realizable, no matter of code writing, you won't have access to this. –  Gnoupi Oct 27 '09 at 15:40
+1 for the 'middle-click' info, I didn't know about that. –  paul Oct 27 '09 at 17:57

1 Answer 1

up vote 1 down vote accepted

This can be done if you learn assembly, debugging and reverse engineering. One can then adjust the binary to register the middle click event and let it call a function to open a new window, this would require one two write two assembly routines and store them in the explorer.exe executable. This is a very hard thing to do! Not to forget you will have to work around the SFC security...

Another solution is to write a higher level hook that hooks middle clicks on the folder and then determines what folder it is and then opens a new window with that folder, this is a lot easier but you still would need to learn the higher level language and how to hook things.

When you ask the question on StackOverflow you will tend to get more details on how to do this...

share|improve this answer

Your Answer


