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How to Enable Tabs in Windows 11 File Explorer

The long-awaited and highly sought feature is here. Here is how to turn on or enable tabs in File Explorer in Windows 11.

Tabs in File Explorer is a feature that many Windows users have been asking, begging, and cursing Microsoft to add. As you might expect, tabs in an application are a simple but useful feature. For instance, most modern software, such as your browser, has tabs.

If you are wondering, tabs in an application allow you to open multiple instances of it in the same window. For example, you can open all your favorite folders in separate tabs in a single window. It enables you to do so much from a single window, get a glance at all opened folders and make navigating between them a breeze.

After a long time, Microsoft finally relented and added tabs to Windows 11 File Explorer. There have been rumors of “Tabs in File Explorer” for a long time. You should use Windows 11 22H2 or higher to enable File Explorer tabs.

Without further ado, this Windows 11 how-to guide will take you through the steps to turn on or enable tabs in Windows 11 File Explorer.

Table of contents:

Important points before proceeding

  • As of writing this, this feature is only available to Insiders. You should be running Windows 11 22H2 or higher.
  • There is no ETA when the “tabs in File Explorer” feature is available to all users.
  • This is an experimental feature. That means you will see a lot of bugs, inconsistencies, and outright crashes. So, I recommend you don’t enable this feature in production machines.
  • You have to use a free, open-source tool to enable tabs in File Explorer in Windows 11.

Enable tabs in Windows 11 File Explorer

We use the ViveTool to enable tabs in File Explorer. It is free and open-source software available on GitHub. Here is how to use the tool and get the job done.

  1. Get the ViveTool software.
  2. Extract the downloaded zip file.
  3. Copy the extracted folder path.
  4. Right-click on the Start menu.
  5. Choose “Windows Terminal (Admin).”
  6. Click the dropdown menu on the top bar and choose “Command Prompt.”
  7. Typecd <copied folder path>” and press Enter.
  8. Execute the below commands one after another.
    vivetool /enable /id:39145991
    vivetool /enable /id:37634385
    vivetool /enable /id:36354489
  9. Close the terminal window.
  10. Restart the computer.
  11. With that, tabs are now enabled in File Explorer.

ViveTool download link: https://github.com/thebookisclosed/ViVe/releases

Detailed steps:

To begin with, open the GitHub page and download the ViveTool. After downloading, extract the zip file to a folder. To do that, right-click on the zip file and choose the “Extract all” option.

click extract all

Click the “Extract” button in the next window. This action will extract the zip file contents to a folder with the same name.

extract vivetool

After that, open the newly extracted folder, click on the “address bar,” and press Ctrl + C to copy the entire folder path. This path is required to run the necessary commands.

copy folder path

Right-click the Start button icon on the taskbar and select “Windows Terminal (Admin).”

enable tabs in Windows 11 File Explorer - select Windows Terminal (Admin)

It will launch the Terminal with administrative privileges. In the terminal, click the dropdown icon in the top bar and select “Command Prompt.”

Then, in Command Prompt, use the following command to navigate to the ViveTool folder. Remember to replace the “folder path” with the path you copied before.

cd "<folder path>"

Once in the ViveTool folder, run the commands listed below in the specified order. After successful execution, you will see the “Successfully set feature configuration” message.

vivetool /enable /id:39145991
vivetool /enable /id:37634385
vivetool /enable /id:36354489

Close the terminal window and restart the computer.

Open File Explorer after rebooting, and you should see tabs at the top. You can begin using them immediately.

That is all. It is that simple to enable tabs in Windows 11 File Explorer.

I hope this easy Windows 11 how-to guide helped you.

If you are stuck or need some help, comment below, and I will try to help as much as possible.

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