Windows has a ghastly love for prefixing the word ‘My’ to the names of various folders. It’s a pain to type and it’s unpleasant to read. You can, of course, rename most of these in the usual Windows way. On my systems, ‘My Computer’ quickly becomes ‘Computer’ and ‘My’ is culled from all the other ‘My’ folders too. You can use a tool like Tweak UI to change the location of Pictures and Music.

This is all very well, but what I hadn’t realised until a few months ago (and which has just come to my attention again, hence blogging it) is that your renamed system folders are also accessible from the address bar auto-complete, so you can type Computer\Control Panel and access the control panel.

Extending this principal a bit, you can give yourself fantastic shorthand access to parts of the computer. I’ve renamed ‘My Documents’ to ‘~’ – ala the Unix home directory name. Windows has the ‘My Documents’ and ‘Home’ directories a bit confused at the best of times (‘Home’ exists but is hidden away, so ‘My Documents’ ends up as the dumping group for a number things which aren’t really documents at all).

The point of this? Now, I can type ~\Pictures and I get to My Pictures. I can type ~\Letters and get to my letters directory. With the old, clumsy default names I would very rarely bother with typing into the address bar at all.

For those who are viewing it, the image above does contain a few ‘My’ prefixed folder names. I’ve gotten lazy.