Setting the Default Shell

Update in Progress...
This page will be more useful soon. I'm working on reworking large portions of the docs at once, which means not everything is going to be perfect. Right now I've moved this information and am placing a space holder section for a bit that hasn't been written yet.. That being said, the bit I moved over is going to need to be rewritten too!

Easy Ways To Set Your Default Shell

overview of how to set shell the easy ways.. tools, programs, letting the installer do it, etc...

Manually Setting your Default Shell

The only reason you'll really need to do this is if you've gone very wrong somwhere. Or, possibly, you feel uber technically super doing this.

If you wish to set the Windows Shell by hand, you need to open a program called Regedit. If you're currently in GeoShell you can usually do this by pressing Win+G together. If you're in explorer you can open regedit.exe by doing Start -> Run -> regedit and then hitting enter.

The first place you need to look is in a key called HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon you can do this by expanding the proper "folders" (they're actually called keys here) until you get there. It's very much like navigating around a file system in any run of the mill file manager!

Once you're there, you need to double click on the shell "file" (it has a little icon with "ab" on it, then the words shell). Now you will have a small little box popup, in here you fill out the path to the executable file you want to use as your shell. For example, my value here is C:\Program Files\Shell\GeoShell\geOShell.exe

If you want to revert to explorer (some people do, you know!) you can just change this to read explorer.exe

Usually that's all you'll need to do, you can close down regedit now, and when you log back on, your shell should have been changed. On the odd chance that it hasn't you might need to change one more value...

Using regedit, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

Here there may or may not be a "shell" string like before, if there is, you can change it like the above one. If you, you'll need to create the string. This is easily done: Right click in the blank space on the right pane, hover over "New" and click on "String Value". Name it "shell" and hit enter to edit the value. In here you change it to the new shell you want.

There, hope you're feeling uber technically super.