Windows tip: Going quickly to special shell folders from the Start menu

Sometimes, you might want to go quickly to certain shell folders. In .NET development, you can use the System.Environment's GetFolderPath method to retrieve the location of these special folder locations, such as the desktop or the common application data folder. Also, you might recall how I've previously blogged about the location of the SendTo folder in Vista, and its somewhat difficult location in the file system. But, what if you wanted to quickly go to these shell folders interactively?

Luckily, there's an easy solution. Windows supports a special naming scheme with the "shell:" prefix in the Start/Search field or in the Start/Run dialog box. There are many such shortcuts, and for example by typing "shell:sendto" to Windows Vista's Start Search field, you can quickly open the SendTo folder at C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo. What a great timesaver!

I haven't found an official documentation page for this trick, but the following is a short list of several useful shortcuts. It seems that this tip works even with Windows 2000 (unable to verify while I'm writing this), but definitely from Windows XP, Windows Vista, and onwards.

shell:Administrative Tools
shell:AppData
shell:Cookies
shell:Cookies
shell:Desktop
shell:Downloads
shell:InternetFolder
shell:Local AppData
shell:ProgramFiles
shell:ProgramFilesCommon
shell:ProgramFilesCommonX86
shell:ProgramFilesX86
shell:Programs
shell:Public
shell:Recent
shell:RecycleBinFolder
shell:SendTo
shell:Start Menu
shell:Start Menu
shell:Startup
shell:System
shell:SystemX86
shell:Windows

Enjoy!