This special folder in Windows is weird. You can only access it by creating a shortcut directly to its so-called "Class ID" behind the scenes. And when you do, you see these weird icons with no name that have a weird option to "invoke" without the usual context menu.
And this one seems to change the display mode of the window. And this one seems to have even more icons inside with no names. What is this?
Well, it actually gets even more interesting. We're going to take a look in this video. The name of this folder is literally called "Command Folder" in the registry if you look at it behind the scenes.
And it's located in the registry at this location with this thing between the brackets being the Class ID. And you can open these, for example, through Explorer. If you type in the address box, just "shell" and then three colons and then the Class ID, it'll open it up.
You can also open it through the run box. Now, how did I even find this folder in the first place, you might be wondering? Well, in another video, I talked about a script that I created called "Super God Mode" that basically goes through and pulls every special location in the Windows registry and the rest of the system, and creates shortcuts to them.
And the name is a throwback to that "God Mode" nicknamed folder that you may have seen on blog posts and stuff. Anyway, the script generates like thousands of links, and this happens to be one of them. Anyway, let's take a closer look inside and at these three icons.
And left-clicking them and double-clicking them does not seem to do anything. Except for the third one, which changes the view type again, and it cycles through them, so it's not just like a static thing. But you can right-click them, and they do have some options, they're a little bit different.
Including Invoke, though at this level, it doesn't seem to do much. But it will do something later. First, let's focus on this first one with this little icon with three pages.
If you right-click and hit Open, it does now actually open this and show more stuff. It looks to be a bunch of icons that look like they're for cut and paste, stuff like that. But again, for each of these, if you right-click them, there's just an option to invoke.
However, you might notice this does not look exactly like a normal Windows Explorer window. You can see that it has this extra bar that says "Organize", and on the right, you have the Change View and Show Preview Pane, and Get Help. If you click on Organize, however, it shows this menu.
And if you look closely, you might notice something. Those icons for the commands here are all exactly the same as the ones we see on the right-hand side. So it turns out that three pages icon thing actually goes into what appears to be a behind-the-scenes interface for that Organize menu.
And these all actually work, like this one for Select All. If you right-click it and hit Invoke, it actually does select all the things in there. For all of these, if you right-click them, they only have the option to invoke except this Layout one, which you can actually click into.
And that's probably because it's a submenu in the Organize menu. And in here, there are five items, despite being four menu options. I'm thinking maybe one of them represents the divider, but invoking any of these doesn't seem to do much.
One strange thing is once you navigate into this Organize menu thing, and that bar appears at the top, even if you navigate out of it or even go to some random other location on your hard drive, it'll actually stay there. Or at least as long as that window's open. And actually, new options may appear in this bar at certain places, such as "Include Selected Folder in Library", stuff like that.
After messing around a bit, I realized something, which is that this interface seems to be the same type that happens when you use the "Open" dialog from programs. Like if we go in Notepad or something and do File > Open, we can see that it's that same bar at the top. However in the Command folder, there's three icons, and I think that these are not actually for the Open dialog bar, but rather the slightly different "Save As" dialog.
If you do File > Save As, you'll notice it also has a bar, but it's a bit different. It does not have the Preview Pane one, whereas the Open dialog does. I'm not sure what happened to the Get Help button, maybe that's something else, and I'm not sure what this middle icon actually does.
Maybe it's for a "New Folder", and it just doesn't work. Again, I'm just kind of making a theory here too. It also kind of made me realize that Windows Explorer apparently has several different special modes that Windows Explorer can be in.
Because this mode with this bar appearing here actually shows up in other places as well. For example, in Windows 11 at least, if you search the start menu for Windows Tools and go to that, you might just think that it looks like a folder with some shortcuts, but it's actually within the Control Panel. And if you looked closely, you would see that it has this same bar yet again.
And interestingly, you can actually open different locations anywhere on the file system from this Control Panel version of Explorer. However, when you do that, notice that now Windows Explorer is basically in an entirely different mode, which looks more like the Windows 10 version of File Explorer again, with that command ribbon bar at the top, all that sort of stuff. And I actually discovered that you can sort of trick Explorer into opening any CLSID location with this Windows 10 mode, basically by piping it through the Control Panel.
Because in the Control Panel, if you right-click and hit Create Shortcut on Windows Tools, it'll create one on the desktop and you're able to see that the location that it created a shortcut to is this big long path. It's like a shell command, and that happens to be for the Control Panel directly, and then a page number, and then the CLSID (class ID) for Windows Tools. But I tested and you could actually replace the thing after the page number with any CLSID.
So here I put the Class ID for the User Downloads folder, and sure enough, now clicking that shortcut actually opens the old Windows 10 Explorer window to the Downloads folder. So for example, you could look at all the Class IDs that is generated by the Super God Mode script, and then use any of those to open the Windows 10 Explorer window there. I haven't been able to figure out how to get it to open any arbitrary file path.
It seems to only do it for Class IDs, but still. There is some more interesting stuff I discovered though, about the top level of this Command Folder. For example, for the first and second one, you can actually right-click and hit "Pin to Start," and it will actually create shortcut files for them that you can look at.
For both of them, they have a path that goes to the Class ID of the command folder, and then a slash, and then whatever must be the Class ID for each individual subcommand thing. I searched the first one in the registry and actually found a registry key called "windows. organize" in a path talking about the "command store", which totally lines up, because now we know that that was for the Organize menu.
And look, you can even see that there is an entry called "subcommands" that lists the stuff we saw before with those icons, like "windows. cut," "windows. copy," "paste," all that sort of stuff.
Unfortunately, I searched the ID of the middle one, but it didn't come back with anything, so I'm really not sure what that's all about. And the third one, you can only invoke. You can't seem to create a shortcut for it at all.
Now, I would be curious if anyone happens to know what that middle icon thing is for, or just if anyone has any fun facts that I didn't mention about the stuff in general. I'd love to hear it. But if you like this kind of video where I just talk about obscure stuff in Windows, definitely give the video a big giant thumbs up for the YouTube algorithm.
Let me know down in the comments, all that good stuff. And if you want to keep watching, the next video I'd recommend is where I talk about that Super God Mode PowerShell script that I created, and actually, it got pretty good reception. PC World, a few other blog sites made articles about it.
I think you'll enjoy it. So I'll put that link right there you can click on. So thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.
