*hypf*

I bet some know the ancient Norton Commander, or at least one of its numerous clones. I myself use Far frequently. Something that makes OFMs so useful is the integrated command line but arguably this works best in a text interface (Total Commander does a sloppy job here, in my eyes).

Wouldn't it be nice to have that same level of command-line integration also in Windows Explorer? A fellow student mentioned that idea to me and I immediately thought that it can and would be useful and quickly hacked together a small impression of how it could look (see attachment).

I found something that implements a command window as a shell extension in Explorer: Command Prompt Explorer Bar but it's written in C#. Remembering Raymond Chen who in turn quotes Jesse Kaplan, one of the CLR program managers: Do not write in-process shell extensions in managed code.

So using the project mentioned above won't be an option, not even as the base of a new one. So probably I will start to write that thing myself one day, using C++.