Configuration of GeoShell is done mostly by directly editing the registry. This is a guide to help you do that without hurting yourself.

Editing the registry Editing the registry is generally not recommended for new computer users to try, but it can be perfectly safe if you don't change things that you don't understand.

Because GeoShell stores it's settings in the registry, there is a defacto settings editor which has support for hierarchical arrangement of settings and even defines certain settings to be of a certain type. That is: the Registry Editor.

You may start the Registry Editor by pressing the Win+G hotkey, if you have it set, or by running the command "Regedit" in GeoCommandTime or the Run dialog (which comes up when you press Win+R. We will be refering to the Registry Editor by it's short name "regedit" from here on, even though you may choose to download and use an alternate registry editor.

The Registry The Registry is organized like a file system in subfolders (called registry keys). The path to the GeoShell key is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Geo\GeoShell There are several different types of values which can be inside a registry key (they're like files with just a single value in them), but for GeoShell, we really only use two: text settings (REG_SZ) and numerical settings (REG_DWORD)

The first thing you should always do is back up anything you are going to change. For GeoShell, we only ever want to change settings inside the path HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Geo\GeoShell, so first you want to find your way there. Start by double clicking on the folder icon labelled "HKEY_CURRENT_USER" in the left pane of your Regedit window, and then on "Software" and "geo" and finally "GeoShell" ...

Now, create your backup by clicking the File menu and choose "Export..." and save this backup somewhere you can find it later. If you're on Windows 2000 or Windows XP, you might want to take advantage of the Favorites feature: Double click the "GeoShell" folder icon, and then click the "Favorites" menu and choose "Add to Favorites." In the future you can open the favorites menu and choose "GeoShell" to get to the right part of the registry right way. Once you've done that ...

You can change any values within the Geo key

Actually, you can change or delete anything you want, as long as you export it first, but we really don't recommend changing anything outside of the "Geo" key unless you already know what your change will do. In the GeoShell section you can edit without fear because you can always restore the backup you just made by "importing" it (the simplest way to do that is to double click on the .reg file in the file system). Of course, if you randomly start deleting things, you want to make sure you know how to set the default shell, in case of emergency

Anyway: to change a value, just double click it in the right hand side, and edit the "Value data:" in the pop-up dialog. To rename a value (or a key, for that matter) right-click it and choose "rename"