Create a keyboard shortcut to toggle the navigation pane in Windows Explorer

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


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