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Alt+Up in Windows Explorer navigates to the parent directory. And Alt+L/R does browser-style forward/back. These combined with typing the file name to select it

Alt+Up in Windows Explorer navigates to the parent directory. And Alt+L/R does browser-style forward/back. These combined with typing the file name to select it makes it pretty easy for me to navigate. One nit I do have is that when you first go into a directory the selection is a bit funky; nothing is selected by default so enter doesn't do anything, but if you press Down it selects the second item, so if you need to go to the first item (pretty common in practice) you have to do this awkward down-up-enter to get there. Edit: Reading comprehension is hard.

Birch-san 8y ago
Try pressing Space instead of Down.
- theandrewbailey 8y ago
  Neat! Thanks for the tip. This might be as useful as when I (accidentally) discovered that Ctrl+W closes Explorer windows. It even works on Windows 98!
  - Birch-san 8y ago
    Other shortcuts that changed the way I use Windows: Alt+Space (open window management context menu) Shift+F10 (right-click using the keyword) Ctrl+Shift+Escape (launch task manager) Windows+E (open Explorer window) Windows+X (open context menu of random useful things) Ctrl+L (select address bar) Home (go to start of line of text) End (go to end of line of text) Ctrl+{direction} (move by one word) Windows+{number} (focus a process from your taskbar) And some useful things in the Run menu (Windows+R): sysdm.cpl (System Properties) inetcpl.cpl (Internet Properties) %APPDATA% (goes to C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming)