How to remove the.exe in Minecraft.exe?

Left click on it once so you highlight it then right click on "Minecraft.exe", scroll down to "Rename" and you can rename it to whatever you want.

Go to control panel. In the serch bar type "folder options". Open the options, and under the "View" tab tick the box where is says "hide extensions for known file types" and press OK.

Hiding the.exe (per Tom) is one thing that will still work. Although, I do not like to do that because sometimes Internet Explorer mangles extensions for downloaded files (like calling a java.jar file a.zip file based on its own guessing instead of Content-type header from the web server). Technically a.jar file is a.zip file, but with a.zip extension Windows would not automatically use java to run it.

If you rename the original file without the.exe it will not run because Windows file systems have no concept of execute permissions and will not know what to do with the file without the.exe extension.

However if you copy and paste a shortcut to Minecraft.exe on your desktop, you can rename that shortcut to anything you want to and it will still work.