Reopen recently closed File Explorer window in Windows 10

How can I reopen a recently closed File Explorer window in Windows 10? I sometimes close a File Explorer window by mistake and I want to reopen it, but it is deeply buried in list of folders. It is a pain to reopen it.

I took a look at Windows 10 Quick Access . It has frequent folders and recent files, but no recent folders.

Is there a way to reopen accidentally closed windows explorer? (All internet browsers allow this, so why can’t Windows allow this?)

Note: I am not asking to reopen Internet Browser tab.

3 Answers 3

There are all sorts of recent items in Explorer.

Recent folders 1

Previously opened folders in Windows Explorer are available via the little down arrow to the right of the path information field.

Recent folders 2

A. Make a shortcut

To make a shortcut to it, right-click on the Desktop, select New > Shortcut, then enter as location the following string

Give it a meaningful name.

B. Add to Quick access

Go to one folder short of it in File explorer, so that’s %UserProfile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows , right-click on Recent items and select Pin to Quick access.

Recent items

This is found in %UserProfile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent and you may use it in one of the above methods.

Third-party add-ons to Explorer

If the above methods are not enough, you need an add-on that might do better than Microsoft in displaying recent folders.

Here are a couple of such add-ons. I never used any of them and so cannot recommend one.

Does «Reopen windows after restart» feature exsist in windows 10 if not is it coming any time soon!

As a mac user I miss this feature so much when I upgraded my windows 7 machine I thought this feature is a must exist in Windows 10 but I’m not sure if there is a way to activate it in the settings. However, if it is not yet on windows 10, is it coming any time soon?

Replies (22) 

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Thank you for posting your query in Microsoft Community.

What is the make and model of your device?

Let me confirm that, when you restart your PC, you can no longer able to see the ongoing tasks or windows that are opened before. It will start your PC as just power-on.

However you can use Hibernate option, which will uses less power than sleep and when you start up the PC again, you’re back to where you left off your work (though not as fast as sleep). Use hibernation when you know that you won’t use your laptop or tablet for an extended period and won’t have an opportunity to charge the battery during that time.

To put your PC to Hibernate, minimize all you window screens by pressing Windows Key + D. Then press Alt key + F4, then select Hibernate from dropdown and click OK.

How to reopen a closed window with the Windows API

I’m making a buttons in a main window ( hwnd ) that when you click on a button it opens new window ( hwndSec ) that can be controlled by the main window ! when i click on a button, the hwndSec showed up ! and while i’m clicking on the other buttons it can be modified . but when i close it and attempt to reopen it again it doesn’t response ! so the buttons become useless !
This a simple example of a single button just to open the window then trying to open it again.

The setting i set for hwndSec:

i make two window procedures :

when i click a button i call this fonction :

and then the second window appear normally , when i close the window it doesn’t came back to appear again.

1 Answer 1

When a window is being closed, it receives a WM_CLOSE message. If that message is passed to DefWindowProc() , the default behavior is to destroy the window:

An application can prompt the user for confirmation, prior to destroying a window, by processing the WM_CLOSE message and calling the DestroyWindow function only if the user confirms the choice.

By default, the DefWindowProc function calls the DestroyWindow function to destroy the window.

This is further discussed on MSDN:

So, you will have to re-create your secondary window with CreateWindow/Ex() each time you want to show it after it has been closed:

If you don’t want to do that, then you need to make the secondary window handle the WM_CLOSE message and not pass it to DefWindowProc() . For instance, call ShowWindow(SW_HIDE) instead, and then you can later call ShowWindow(SH_SHOW) when needed

How to re-open the closed window?

i’ve seen so many samples that in order to open closed window i should hide the window in closing event, but this is not fair for me if i close window in middle of my work and again open same window it showing me content where i left because i’m hiding window previously. So how can i start freshly my window after closed or hide the window.

currently i’m calling winload method which is to show fresh window after calling the show method of a hide window.

3 Answers 3

If you want the behaviour of hide/show, you should not call Window.Close() on the window at all, but hide it by calling Window.Hide(). If the user has closed it though and a close is unavoidable, you can try the following. Override OnClosing inside the Window and set e.Cancelled to true, then call .Hide(). This should allow the window to be hidden/shown even if the user closes the window.

EDIT:

Ok I’ve now read your question properly 😉 So how can i start freshly my window after closed or hide the window.

When you re-show the window using the above, it will of course be the same instance as the one that was previously hidden, hence will have the same data and state. If you want completely new contents you need to create a new Window() and call Window.Show() on that. If you hide/show as above then you’ll get the window back in exactly the same state before it was hidden.

Are you using the MVVM pattern in your WPF application? If so, you could try the following. By having all the data in your ViewModel and bound to by the View (ie: no business logic or data in the code behind of the Window), then you could invoke a method on the ViewModel to reset all data when the window is shown. Your bindings will refresh and the window state will be reset. Note this will only work if you have correctly followed MVVM and bound all elements on the main form to ViewModel properties (including sub controls).

Reopen a closed window with all its tabs in Microsoft Edge

I’ve closed a Microsoft Edge (25.10586.0.0) window that had multiple old tabs on it restored over multiple starts, while unawares that I’d minimized a single window with nothing important on it. Now if I quit edge, when I next start it with «reopen last session» it will only open the unimportant window and not the important (recently closed one).

I can try control-shift-T but it reopens only tabs specific to the remaining window’s history. If I look in the history, which I cannot search, I am amazed to not see very many of the tabs I just closed. EG a Docker image for Apache Drill, some Github pages etc.

Is reopening the last closed window with all it’s tabs a missing feature? This is infuriating. Is there a work around?

2 Answers 2

You can now do this using the new Microsoft Edge feature that ships with the Creators Update in Windows 10, it’s called «Set these tabs aside».

While it’s not as easy as simply clicking Exit on Chrome or Firefox you can indeed have many New Browser instances open, reboot and click Tabs You’ve Set Aside and successfully restore your previous browser state.

Now with the Chromium version of Edge out, this issue is now fixed.

The same thing just happened to me (I had multiple windows open and accidentally closed one that had several important tabs). In a panic I searched for a way to restore the closed window, and came across this very question. From the other answer and the comments, my heart began to sink. But then I realized that they are outdated!

This is how it works in recent versions of Edge (which are based on Chromium). If you close a window containing more than 1 tab, and if you have yet to open any new tab in any other window, then you can reopen the closed window either by right-clicking on the tab area in any of the remaining open windows, or by using the keyboard shortcut CTRL + SHIFT + T as indicated in the picture below.