Reopen Windows apps with UndoClose

If you close a tab in Firefox and then realize you’ve made a mistake, it’s easily fixed: just press Ctrl+Shift+T and the last-closed tab will be instantly reopened. Very convenient.

If you’re working at the Windows 7 desktop and accidentally close the wrong application or Explorer window, though, there’s no obvious safety net to reload them. Unless, that is, you run UndoClose, which delivers very similar functionality at the press of a key.

Close an Explorer window by mistake, for instance, and you’d normally have to reload it and manually browse back to the appropriate folder. UndoClose tracks the folders you close, though, so as long as it’s running, all you have to do is press Ctrl+Shift+F and the folder will be restored.

It’s a similar story for applications. If you’ve just closed Notepad, say, pressing Ctrl+Shift+A will reload it: easy. (Although it won’t restore whatever document you had opened last, so if that’s important then you’ll need to reload it manually.)

And you can use either hotkey multiple times to restore several applications and folders, or open the program’s settings dialog to manually select the options you need from your folder history.

This isn’t quite as good as it seems at first, because, of course, Windows 7 does provide a built-in way to do something similar to this, via its jumplists. If you still have Explorer pinned to your desktop, say, then right-clicking the icon will reveal your recently-viewed folders, and you can restore one with a click. And right-clicking Notepad will list all your recently-opened documents, so again you can reopen the last one immediately (not just an empty program window).

Still, if you’re a fan of keyboard shortcuts then it’ll probably feel faster and more natural to reopen an Explorer window with a hotkey, rather than reaching for the mouse and browsing jumplists (especially if they’re not conveniently pinned to the taskbar). And the program’s memory footprint isn’t bad, either, at around 24MB. So if you’d like to restore closed folders just as easily as you do a browse tab, then give UndoClose a try: it’s compact, portable, and should make your Windows 7 desktop just a little more comfortable to use.

Photo Credit: Michael D Brown/Shutterstock