How to hide Quick Access from File Explorer on Windows 10
Quick Access is a virtual location on your PC that builds up over time to show you folders you’ve been accessing a lot. You can pin your more frequently accessed folders to Quick Access. Much like you would bookmark a website in your web browser, pinning an item to Quick Access is like bookmarking a location in File Explorer. While the feature is useful, it may not be for everyone. If you’d like to hide Quick Access from File Explorer, you can do so with a simple registry edit.
Hide Quick Access from File Explorer
We’re going to edit the registry via Command Prompt which means you don’t have to use the registry editor. We have instructions for doing it from the registry editor as well.
Open Command Prompt with admin rights and run the following command.
REG ADD HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer /v HubMode /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
Once you run the command, you need to restart File Explorer. You can do this from the Task Manager. Select Windows Explorer and click the Restart button.
To get Quick Access back, run the following command in an elevated Command Prompt window. Once again, you will need to restart File Explorer to apply the change.
REG ADD HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer /v HubMode /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
If you’d like to make this change via the registry editor, you have to first open it. Tap the Win+R keyboard shortcut to open the run box. Enter ‘regedit’ and tap the Enter key.
In the registry editor, go to the following key.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
Right-click the Explorer key and select New>DWORD (32-bit) value from the context menu. Name this value HubMode. Double-click it and in the value data box, enter 1. Restart File Explorer and Quick Access will be hidden. To unhide it, change the value of the HubMode value to 0.
Remember that you’re only hiding Quick Access, you aren’t disabling it. It still exists as a feature on Windows 10 and when you unhide it, any and all folders that you pinned to it will still be there. Quick Access is one of two locations that File Explorer can open to by default but it tends to show folders based on your use. This means that it’s always going to change. If that’s what bothers you, you can pin the folders you access often, and explicitly blacklist folders you don’t want Quick Access to show you. The blacklist feature isn’t very well documented but it’s a simple way to keep certain folders out of Quick Access.
