How to open a PowerShell in the current folder?

Question

This keyboard shortcut Shift + Menu, W, Enter opens the command prompt. Scott Hanselman points to an app that does the same for PowerShell and says it's builtin in Windows 7.

The tool doesn't seem to work on Windows 7 and can't find the builtin option.

Solution

The Elevation PowerToys from Microsoft include a tool to open a PowerShell window in the current folder, among lots of other useful things. (I'm assuming there's no built-in way to do this, otherwise Microsoft wouldn't offer it as a download on their site.)

Once you've downloaded and extracted them, navigate to their folder, right-click on PowerShellHere.inf and click Install. A PowerShell Prompt Here option will be added to the context menu of all directories and drives. You can also add context menu entries to open a PowerShell window with administrator privileges or as the NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM user.

Alternatively, if you don't want to install anything, you can just use the Open command window here option built-in to Windows and then run powershell at the normal command prompt. A PowerShell session will open in the same command prompt window.