Registry Editor Gets the Address Bar Feature in Windows 10

Windows 10 Insider Preview 14942 has a interesting new feature which Microsoft didn’t document. Registry Editor (Regedit.exe) in Insider Preview build 14942 gets the super useful Address Bar feature.

You can press Alt + D to go to the Address bar, click Ctrl + C to copy the current registry location, or type a registry path where you want to go directly, just as you would use the File Explorer Address bar to open a folder path.

It doesn’t support abbreviated forms though, such as HKCU (for HKEY_CURRENT_USER), HKLM (for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE) and so forth. And you can turn off the Address bar feature from the View menu.

Source: Rafael Rivera was the first to find out this excellent feature, and wrote about it at Thurrott.

Update: Microsoft later added this note in their 14942 announcement post.

For our power users, we have added something special in this build – Registry Editor (regedit) now has an address bar! This enables you to easily see your current registry key path, and copy it if needed. You can also paste or type in paths, and pressing enter will take you to that location. You can use Alt + D to set focus to the address bar.

The address bar feature can get even better if support for abbreviated forms is added. And it would be great if Microsoft adds a direct jump feature in the Registry Editor by adding a command-line switch.

Update (Nov 10, 2016)

As of Build 14965, Registry Editor address bar now supports abbreviations or shorthand notations such as:

• HKCR for HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT
• HKCU for HKEY_CURRENT_USER
• HKLM for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
• HKU for HKEY_USERS

And, to to set the focus on the address bar, you can either use Alt + D or Ctrl + L keys.

Regedit.exe is one of the my most frequently used tools. I’ve been using the RegJump tool from Microsoft Windows SysInternals to jump directly to a registry path copied to the Clipboard or by passing the registry path as an argument. You can read more about that in article Using RegJump to Quickly Jump to the Registry Path Stored in Clipboard.

And long time back I made a Internet Explorer extension to jump to a registry key directly. Check out post Add “Go To Registry Key” to the Right-Click Menu in Internet Explorer.