How to open items with Single Click instead of Double Click in Windows 10

Sometimes I wonder, why to click twice when clicking once can do the job!? One of the first things I do after a fresh Windows install is to change the double-click to open files setting to single-click. Let us see how to do this.

Change double click to single click via File Explorer Options

To open items with Single Click instead of Double Click in Windows 10, do the following:

1. Navigate to Taskbar Search and type 'Folder'
2. Open File Explorer Options, earlier called Folder Options
3. Here, under the General tab, you will see Click items as follows.
4. Select Single-click to open an item (point to select).
5. Click Apply/OK and exit
6. Restart Explorer and see.

The change will be visible when you single-click on any file or folder.

When you do this you need to click only once on an icon, with your mouse pointer to open a file.

You may also want to select the Underline icon tiles only when I point at them option.

Open items with Single Click - Using Command line

You can also set Windows 10 to open items with Single Click using the command line.

Create a system restore point first and then open an elevated Command Prompt (or PowerShell) and execute the following commands:

REG ADD “HKCUSOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorer” /V IconUnderline /T REG_DWORD /D 2 /F

And then-

REG ADD “HKCUSOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorer” /V ShellState /T REG_BINARY /D 240000001ea8000000000000000000000000000001000000130000000000000062000000 /F

This will add values to the Registry.

To reverse the change and make Windows open items with a double-click, execute these commands:

REG ADD “HKCUSOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorer” /V ShellState /T REG_BINARY /D 240000003ea8000000000000000000000000000001000000130000000000000062000000 /F

Need more Mouse tips? Read this post on Mouse Tricks For Windows.