Adding new commands to Windows explorer. Every now and again I end up in a bothersome situation where I have files in multiple sub-directories that I want to bring together into one directory. This usually entails descending into each directory, selecting the contents and doing a cut & paste into the parent. It gets tiresome.
As I pondered the explorer context menu I wished that there was a “copy contents into this directory” option… it bothered me that there wasn't and I pondered just how hard it would be to add one. Turns out the answer is “not hard at all.”
A quick Google search turned up an article about adding new shell context extensions to explorer which taught me the general principle. The hard part was tinkering with cmd and xcopy to get the right effect.
Now I have a shiny new “Promote contents” item in my explorer context menu. It would be nicer if I could have figured out how to do this without a dos box popping up but, for now, it's quite good enough. [Curiouser and curiouser!]