UPDATE (Aug 2025) — Windows 11 has a new setting under System > For developers > Terminal where you can Choose the default terminal app to host command-line apps. The choices are Windows Console Host or Windows Terminal (which is a modern replacement for the former). You can now right-click on or in a folder in Windows Explorer and open the command-line of your choice.
NOTE (Sep 2019) — Some recent Windows update has broken the following instructions. The registry change no longer returns the missing context menu. If anyone knows of a simple low-risk fresh workaround, please let me know.
Before the most recent major update to Windows 10 you could shift + right-click in a blank part of the Windows Explorer file list and get a context menu "Open command window here". I've been using that feature dozens of times daily for a decade. The menu was recently replaced with "Open PowerShell window here".
PowerShell is certainly an advanced scripting language, but it has irritatingly different behaviour for someone who just
wants to run a few dir or pkzip commands quickly in
the folder that is currently selected in Windows Explorer. Many old commands and /switch combinations are invalid and
have to be prefixed with cmd /c
to work in the PowerShell window, which wastes time.
There are many articles on how to get the old menu back, but a lot of them are dangerous or overkill. One article led me to the simplest fix. In a nutshell, login at the real Administrator, not an elevated user and go here:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shell\cmd
- Let local Administrator take ownership of the key, subkeys and values away from TrustedInstaller.
- Give local Administrator Full Control of the key and subkeys.
- Rename the DWORD value
HideBasedOnVelocityIdtoShowBasedOnVelocityId.
These are rather strange steps, but they seem to be the least worst or dangerous that work. I worry that step 1 might have side-effects, but I'll ignore that possibility for now because of the productivity benefit of getting the old menu back.