Windows is very user friendly and GUI oriented operating system. Other operating systems like Unix, Linux, BSD came from non-GUI heritance and adopted the GUI experience in recent decade very good. In contrast Microsoft started to provide more productive command line support to use Windows operating systems features. One of the most used operation is starting applications. In this tutorial we will look how to start an GUI application from command line and relative ways. The started application can be also an command line application too.

Start From Start Search Box

The first way to start and app either GUI or non-GUI the start search box can be used. Normally this is used to search computer for file and directories but before starting to search files and directories it search for given term in commands and applications. We will start Windows Paint with the mspaint command like below.

Start With Run Command Box

Run command box is used to run commands directly in a shell in Windows operating systems. Run command box provides easy shortcut for running commands. Run Command Box can be opened with WIN+r keyboard shortcut. The application will be entered like below.

Start From MS-DOS

MS-DOS is actually a simple operating system for 30 years old. MS-DOS console can be accesses like below from the start menu. This is named Command Prompt .

After starting MS-DOS Command Prompt we will just input the mspaint command and hit enter.

Start From Powershell

Powershell is new command prompt provided by Microsoft as an alternative to the MS-DOS. Applications with or without GUI can be start with Powershell too. Starting is similar to the MS-DOS command prompt. First we will start Powershell

Then we will just run the command like mspaint like below.

Start From Batch File

Batch files are used to run commands file a file. Batch file mechanism generally used to run Scheduled Jobs but there are different use cases too. We will write a batch file named paint.bat and put mspaint as containt into this file like below. The bat extension is important.

paint.bat

mspaint

Start From File Explorer Address Bar

File explorer is another useful tool to start an application. The location or address bar can be used to run an application. In this situation we should know and put the absolute path of the application to the location bar like below. In this example the full path of the mspaint is

C:\Windows\System32\mspaint.exe