10 Cool Command Prompt Tricks for You
With an attractive interface, Windows 10 also comes with an impressive command-line tool. The Command prompt on Windows 10 may not be powerful enough as compared to the UNIX terminal. But it allows you to play with Windows using command prompt tricks.
You can perform various tasks quickly using the Command prompt as compared to the GUI method. For example, you can create a Wi-Fi hotspot using the command prompt in a single command. Doing the same via GUI may involve multiple steps.
SEE ALSO: A to Z list of all Windows CMD Commands.
Top 10 Cool CMD Tricks You Should Know
In this tutorial, we are going to show you 10 cool command prompt tricks. You can use these to speed up your work or impress your friends. So, let’s check these cool CMD tricks one by one.
1. Open Command Prompt in a Directory
Opening the Command prompt from the Start menu and navigating a specific path has always been a time-consuming task. Plus it becomes very frustrating if you have to do it multiple times. So, here is the simplest command prompt trick using which you can easily open the CMD window right in your working folder.
First of all, browse to the folder where you want to open the CMD window. Then, type cmd
in the address bar of Windows File Explorer and press Enter.
After you press Enter, the Command prompt window will open inside that directory. You can verify the path in the prompt text as shown below. Now, you can start working on it.
SEE ALSO: How to Open Command Prompt in Current Folder (Various Methods)?
2. Encrypt Files and Folders using CMD Tricks
Now, let’s talk about privacy. Encrypting files and folders is one of the most common ways to protect your important files from unauthorized access. Windows 10 allows you to encrypt your files easily using CMD commands. We are not sure about the encryption quality that Windows 10 supports, but any level of encryption is better than no encryption at all.
So, to protect your private data from unauthorized access, you can encrypt your data using this command prompt trick. First of all, open the command prompt in the folder where you have your important data (you can use the first trick explained above). Then, type Cipher /E
command in the CMD window and press Enter.
All your files and folders inside the current working folder will be encrypted. You will also get a notification to back up your encryption key, which we suggest you do.
Now, no one using another account will be able to access your encrypted files. They will need your password to decrypt them before they can access them. These Command prompt tricks are really useful.
SEE ALSO: 8 Cool Computer Tips and Tricks that You Should Know.
3. Change Command Prompt Text and Background Color
The default black-and-white colors of the Command prompt might look boring to you. So, in this trick, we are going to show you how you can change CMD text and background colors to your liking.
To get started with the type of colors Windows Command prompt supports, type the help color
command in the CMD window and press Enter. Here you can see the numbers or characters allocated to respective colors.
You can now experiment with various colors to find which one best suits you. In this tutorial, we are using bright white text color and green background color. So, to change CMD colors, type color
followed by the color codes for the background and text.
As we decided to have bright white text on a green background, the command for us will be color 2f
. Press Enter after typing the command and colors will change immediately. This is one of the coolest CMD tricks we used.
SEE ALSO: How to Hide Files in the Image using Command Prompt?
4. Change Prompt Text in CMD Window
Continuing with customizations in the Command prompt, let’s change the prompt text to something cool. We especially like UNIX prompt text which looks similar to user@hostname>
. This is one of the command prompt tricks that you can use to impress your friends.
So, in this CMD trick, we are going to change the CMD Prompt text to [email protected]>
. We are going to use the prompt
command to change the prompt text. So, the full command for us becomes prompt [email protected]$G
. Press Enter and see the magic.
You might be wondering about the $G we added to the command. It stands for greater than symbol which you see after the prompt text. You can check the full list of available special characters that you can use, simply type help prompt
command and press Enter.
5. Change the Title of the Command Prompt Window
Let’s check another CMD customization trick. This time let’s change the CMD window title to something personalized. Here, we are going to change it to “HELLPC.NET Console” which looks pretty personalized.
To change the CMD title, type the title
command followed by the new title text for the CMD window. So, we are going to use the title HELLPC.NET Console
command to change the CMD title to “HELLPC.NET console“. Press Enter after typing the command and the title will change immediately.
We hope you like these Command Prompt tricks. Keep reading for more.
SEE ALSO: How to make a Bootable USB using Command Prompt?
6. Watch Star Wars in Command Prompt
Almost everyone is a fan of Star Wars movies. But did you know that you can watch a Star Wars movie in Command Prompt in the form of ASCII text? Thanks to Star Wars Asciimation, you can watch Star Wars: A New Hope in the command prompt via telnet.
So, just open the command prompt window, type the following command, and press Enter.
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
The command prompt will connect to the telnet server. On a successful connection, the ASCII text version of Star Wars will start playing immediately. You will certainly enjoy this text version of Star Wars. This is going to be one of your favorite command prompt tricks.
NOTE: Make sure that you have enabled Telnet in Windows 10 already to use this trick as Telnet is not enabled by default.
7. Create a Wi-Fi Hotspot using the Command Prompt
Almost everyone has used a Wi-Fi hotspot on mobiles to share the internet connection with others. Similarly, you can use the Wi-Fi hotspot on your laptop to share your internet connection with others.
In this trick, we will show you how to create a Wi-Fi hotspot on your Windows 10 PC using the command prompt. In the CMD window, type the following command and press Enter to set up a Wi-Fi hotspot.
netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid=HotspotName key=Password
Make sure to replace “HotspotName” with the actual name of your Wi-Fi hotspot. And replace “Password” with the actual wifi-password you want to set.
However, the Wi-Fi hotspot will not turn on automatically. To turn the hotspot ON, use the netsh wlan start hostednetwork
command, and to turn it OFF, type netsh wlan stop hostednetwork
the command and press Enter.
You can also check this tutorial to view saved WiFi passwords in Windows 10 or 11. Let’s check out other command prompt tricks now.
SEE ALSO: How to Create Folder Bomb Batch File?
8. Hide Folders using Command Prompt
You can easily hide folders by checking the Hidden box in the Folder’s Properties window. But, have you ever tried hiding folders using the command prompt? No, let’s see how you can do it. The best part of hiding folders using CMD is that they won’t be visible even after enabling Hidden items from the View menu.
First, enable Hidden items from the View menu in File Explorer.
Now open the command prompt in the parent folder using Trick 1 explained above. Then, type the following command in the CMD window and press Enter.
attrib +h +s +r folder_name
Don’t forget to replace folder_name with the actual folder name.
Now, you can see that even after enabling Hidden items in File Explorer’s view menu, the folder isn’t visible.
Don’t worry about the folder, it’s still there. You can unhide this folder by using the following command.
attrib -h -s -r folder_name
Let’s move to the 9th point of our CMD tricks list.
SEE ALSO: How to Create Undeletable, Unsearchable Hidden Folders?
9. Copy Command Output to Clipboard
Copying text from the command prompt has never been easy. Especially if the command’s output is quite large, e.g. tree
command. Luckily, using the following CMD trick, you can easily copy any command’s output to the clipboard. Then you can paste it anywhere you want.
Open the command prompt and enter the command whose output you want to copy. In this example, we are using the ipconfig
command. Just add | clip
after the command. After you press Enter, you will notice that there is no output. That’s because the output got copied to the clipboard.
Now, open Notepad and press the Ctrl + V keyboard shortcut to paste the command output in Notepad. Open a text editor like Notepad and you can paste the output there.
SEE ALSO: How to set Windows Terminal to Launch Command Prompt by Default?
10. Get the List of all Installed Programs
You can perform any task on Windows using CMD that you can do via GUI. Even you can get the list of installed programs using a CMD command. Simply type the following command in the command prompt window and press Enter.
wmic product get name
After executing the above command, you will get the list of all programs installed on your PC.
You can also uninstall programs using the command prompt. You can type the command in the following format:
wmic product where "name like '%NAMEOFAPP%'" call uninstall /nointeractive
And don’t forget to replace “NAMEOFAPP” with the name of the app that you want to uninstall.
SEE ALSO: How to Uninstall Programs using Command Prompt?
10 Awesome Command Prompt Tricks You Should Know
So, those were 10 cool command prompt tricks we compiled for you. Besides these, you can also try other little tricks like using TAB for auto-completing commands or using the arrow keys to navigate to previous commands. You can also press F7 to see the command history of the current session. You can also use Registry Editor to make your computer a time server.
Hope you liked our list of 10 command prompt tricks. These command prompt tricks really might come in handy sometimes. You may also like the trick to make a zip bomb. Feel free to share them with your friends. Also, share your thoughts and suggestions in the comment section below.
Thanks for the tips. I love command prompt tricks that can do awesome stuff. Some of the above tricks I already new, but there was also new tricks for me. I love the Star Wars ASCII text by the way.