There may be times when you want to hide the navigation pane in Windows Explorer. For example sometimes if I’m working with a directory of images I want to hide the navigation pane so that the entire Explorer window is filled with thumbnails of the images in the folder.
Unfortunately Windows Explorer doesn’t provide a hotkey for this, but there is a fairly easy way to do it:
1. Install the free, Open-Source program called AutoHotKey. During installation it will ask which version do you want to install. If you are on a modern, 64-bit machine then I recommend choosing the Unicode 64-bit option.
2. Right-click on an empty area of the Desktop and in the menu select New -> AutoHotKeyScript. Enter a name for the new script, for example Toggle Navigation Pane.ahk.
3. Right-click on the script’s desktop icon and select Edit Script. On a new line after the default text in the script enter the following:
#NoTrayIcon
#Persistent
#NoEnv
#SingleInstance, Force
#IfWinActive ahk_class CabinetWClass
#a::
Send !d!vn{enter}ln
Now save it and close the editor window.
4. Right-click on the script’s desktop icon and select Run Script.
Now, when you are in Windows Explorer, when you press Win + A key combination it will toggle the navigation pane off or on. Note that this is for Windows 8 through 10. For Windows 7 see the thread below for the appropriate AutoHotKey script code.
Reference:
superuser.com Keyboard shortcut to hide/show Explorer navigation
Leave a Reply