User Windows Explorer address bar autocompletion for quick folder navigation?

Question

When I start typing something in the Windows Explorer address bar, it displays a small list of autocompletion entries below the address bar.

I'd like to use these autocompletion suggestions to navigate faster between folders: Say I have a folder named FooFolder somewhere deep down in my user's folder. At the moment, I am in folder BarFolder, which is somewhere else, and I want to navigate to FooFolder. When I select the address bar and start to type Foo..., I want Windows Explorer to display FooFolder in the autocompletion entries, so that I can quickly navigate there without having to click through the entire folder structure. Unfortunately, I don't know if this is possible, or how to activate it.

All the folders I'm talking about are indexed with Windows Search, so it should not take Explorer too long to compile the list of autocompletion entries.

Is there a way to make this work? Maybe an Explorer plugin?

EDIT: I know there are tools like Direct Folders which allow such quick folder navigation. The problem with these tools is that I have to manually select the folders I want to navigate to. With the index of Windows Search, it should be possible to create something like Direct Folders which can predict/guess the folder I want.

Answer 1

I think I might have found a way to do this without too much extra software. On my machine at least, all files and folders in desktop already show up in the autocomplete drop-down. If you create shortcuts to your folders and put them in your desktop folder, they will show up in the autocomplete drop-down.

The only problem with this is it will fill up your desktop folder, so if you use the desktop folder much and show hidden files, this might be inconvienent. Anyway, if that isn't a problem, here's an autohotkey script which should automatically create hidden shortcuts for every folder in a drive. You can use windows tasks schedualer to make it run automatically.

Loop, D:\*, 2, 1 
{
   FileDelete, %A_Desktop%\%A_LoopFileName%.lnk
   FileCreateShortcut, %A_LoopFileFullPath%, %A_Desktop%\%A_LoopFileName%.lnk
   FileSetAttrib, +H, %A_Desktop%\%A_LoopFileName%.lnk
}

Replace 'D' with the drive of your choice. If you don't want the shortcuts to be hidden, remove the FileSetAttrib line. Another consideration is if your drive is large, or contains system files, you may not want to shortcut it all, due to performance considerations. To reduce the scope (maybe just documents), enter another path instead of "D:\".