Well, probably my Windows tip of the year, in fact. And it's better than just "Don't use it". ;-)
Enabling Windows Command Completion. If you don't fancy hand editing the registry, download and run this registry entry file, auto_completion.reg. At your own risk, naturally. ;-) This works for me on NT (SP6) and XP.
With this done, you can type in the first few letters of any file or directory name at the command prompt and hit tab, and cycle through all matching names. Class.
I simply don't understand why you have to hack the registry to get this working. Microsoft went to all the bother of putting this very useful feature in, then didn't provide any way of turning it on. Idiocy.
Posted to Software by Simon Brunning at October 27, 2003 02:24 PMNot bad, but still not cygwin ;-P
Posted by: Andy Todd on October 27, 2003 02:32 PMTrue, but it's only a 103 byte download. How big is Cygwin these days? ;-)
Posted by: Simon Brunning on October 27, 2003 02:37 PMIts another one of those things exposed by TweakUI (cmd tab)
Posted by: Paul on October 27, 2003 02:55 PMThe XP version of TweakUI does expose this, but the NT version doesn't.
Posted by: Simon Brunning on October 27, 2003 02:58 PMAh, okay, it is exposed on the Win2000 version too. I forgot about that.
Posted by: Paul on October 27, 2003 04:46 PMWhen you think about it, it's amazing that more developers don't know about this. I only found it last year. When I mentioned it to a colleague, he looked at me funny and asked, "Didn't you know?"
Posted by: Alan Green on October 28, 2003 11:22 PM