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Windows 11 context menu: How to fix the new right-click menu
As part of Windows 11’s comprehensive aesthetic update, Microsoft has created a new right-click context menu that is larger and easier to read than Windows 10. Based on what you right-clicked, the context menu now contains a row of icons for basic operations such as copy, paste, and delete, which were once lost in all other commands that inflated the classic context menu.This is a good idea in theory-the problem is that the context menu of Windows 11 now hides some functions you might want, located behind the “Show more options” button, which will display a completely different Context menu. Pooh?
Here is an explanation of what happened to the new Windows 11 context menu and how to get the classic context menu back if you don’t like the classic context menu.
You know how to program Love Insert yourself into your context menu, but some people deserve this position more than others? For example, I like 7-Zip’s context menu integration because it allows me to easily extract files to the current directory or just right-click to extract to a new directory. But others drive me crazy and make my context menu difficult to navigate-I don’t want Dropbox or Windows Media Player or Cast to Device to be there, because I don’t use any of these features often.Any old Windows installation is guaranteed to have a messy, inefficient context menu, unless you deliberately use a program like this to manage it ShellExView.
Microsoft knows that context menus are terrible. “The menu is extremely long. Since Windows XP introduced IContextMenu, it has grown in an unregulated environment for 20 years,” Microsoft said In a blog post this summer. The post highlights many of the problems here: improper grouping of commands, long menus, etc. Windows 11 aims to solve this problem.
As the blog explains, the menu has been reorganized to better separate the basic Windows context menu content from application-specific content, such as my 7-Zip example.But part of this redesign means the way The application hooks to the context menu is different, which means that the developer must issue an update that takes this into account. So now at startup, unless I click “Show more options” to display the old menu, the Nvidia control panel shortcut will not show up in my context menu.
The good news is that the application can still enter the new context menu. Actually, Someone has forked 7-Zip Update it specifically for Windows 11. Therefore, the Windows 11 context menu will not be destroyed, and any function you have been used to over the years may be restored soon, unless you use some old and no longer updated software. But if you really don’t like the redesign, or Can’t wait to wait for these updates to restore the context menu to full functionality, so now you can easily restore to the classic context menu.
If you don’t want to delve into “Show More Options” in the context menu to more easily perform the operations that you could do in Windows 10 before, then here are the tips to fix the Windows 11 context menu.
1. Open Regedit by pressing the Windows key and typing Registry Editor. Press Enter to start it.
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareClassesCLSID
3. Right-click> New> Item, and paste this name: {86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}
4. Highlight the new key you just created, right-click again> New> Key, and paste this name: InprocServer32
5. Double click (default) Registry key, and then press Enter without entering anything to set its value to blank. Before making this change, you will see it under the “Data” column saying (the value is not set), but once you press Enter, it will not display anything.
6. Close the registry editor. To view the new (classic) context menu, restart your computer or open Task Manager, scroll down to the Windows Explorer process, and right-click> End Task.Then File>Run New Task and enter Resource manager Restart the Windows Explorer process. There you go: the context menu has changed!
As explained in this Reddit post, If you are satisfied with it, you can also perform the above steps faster through the command line. You can also reverse the process to restore the new Windows 11 menu. If you are curious about how editing works, the short explanation is that it is blank where Windows looks for the new context menu code, so it will fall back to the old code. This is not surprising: after all, there are still some very old things in Windows 11.