If you’re like me, you love shortcuts and other tools that improve productivity. One of the other things I’ve gained a liking for is the Bash shell, after spending time in a Unix environment. Since I couldn’t live without this, and the other tools that typically come with a Unix environment, I installed the great Cygwin, in order to create a Linux-like environment on my Windows PC. (Not ready to make the full jump to Linux yet, for gaming reasons)

However, one thing that always irked me was having to manually navigate to a certain folder after opening up a Bash shell in Cygwin. For Windows, there is a PowerToy called “Open Command Window Here”, that provides a context menu option for quickly opening a (Windows) command prompt with the location set to the selected folder. This is helpful, since you often have the folder open when you want to also have a command prompt at the same location. Now, all I needed was the equivalent function, but for the Cygwin Bash shell, instead of the Windows Command prompt.

Creating a “Bash Prompt Here” shortcut

I did some searching and found a myriad of solutions to my problem, most of which were somewhat complicated. Thankfully, I did find one link that suggested an easier solution.

Basically, here’s what you do. When you install Cygwin (of if you’ve already installed it, download it again and start setup again to run an update), make sure that you select the chere package under the “Shells” category.

After Cygwin is launched, open it up and type the command chere -i, like so:

You should now see the following option in your folder’s context menu, and more importantly, it works!

Hope you found this helpful!