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Windows comes prepackaged with a ton of handy run-dialog shortcuts to help you launch apps and tools right from the run box; is it possible to add in your own custom shortcuts?

Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites.

The Question

SuperUser reader Nic finds the run-dialog shortcuts to be handy and wants to expand upon them:

When I hit Windows+R, I can type in calc and get a calculator really quickly. Same thing for mspaint. My question is, how do I adjust this so I can type "netbeans" and have it open the program?

If you're a keyboard ninja, having super speedy access to your favorite apps in this fashion would be handy. How do you go about it?

The Answer

SuperUser contributor John T offers a quick and simply way to accomplish the shortcut addition:

The easiest option would be to add the following location to your path variable:

C:\Program Files\NetBeans X.X.X\bin

replace X.X.X with your version of Netbeans.

Alternatively you could make a shortcut to the netbeans.exe executable in the above path, and place that shortcut in a location that's already in your path (e.g. C:\Windows\System32).

If you'd like a step-by-step tutorial for editing the system PATH, make sure to check out How to Edit Your System PATH for Easy Command Line Access.


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