You turn your computer on, now faced with the dozens of files and applications on your desktop. You right-click on one folder; –perhaps it is the one full of family pictures from last summer’s vacation, or pictures of you during your recent game.– You want to open it, but you are met with a whole …
You turn your computer on, now faced with the dozens of files and applications on your desktop. You right-click on one folder; –perhaps it is the one full of family pictures from last summer’s vacation, or pictures of you during your recent game.– You want to open it, but you are met with a whole list of options in the now-visible context menu. Everything is so unorganized and hard to find! There’s a bunch of things you have never used, and will probably never use, so why can’t you get rid of them?!
Well, lucky for you, we will now show you how to clean up your messy context menu.
Windows includes a whole bunch of options in the context menu by default, and the list grows as you install more and more apps. Every app wants a spot on your context menu, but half the time, you probably don’t even look at them.
But with the method we will show you today, you will be able to clean up your menu by editing your registry. We’ll also share a slightly easier method using some free third-party apps, and we’ll point you toward a method for adding some more useful commands. Without too much effort, you can take your context menu from being cluttered and only mostly useful to being streamlined and efficient.
If you want to clean things up the hard way, you can do so from the Registry Editor without the need for third-party software. We’ll get to the easier tools a bit later, but we think it helps when using those tools to understand how this stuff is handled in the Registry.
Warning: Registry Editor is a powerful tool and misusing it can render your system unstable or even inoperable. If you’ve never worked with it before, consider reading about how to use the Registry Editor before you get started. And definitely back up the Registry (and your computer!) before making changes. This is especially true when following the guidelines in this article, because you’ll end up having to do a little hunting around to find the context menu entries that mean something to you.
Open the Registry Editor by hitting Start and typing “regedit.” Press Enter to open Registry Editor and then give it permission to make changes to your PC.
The items that populate your context menu, unfortunately, will not all be in the same place in the Registry. You can find most of the context menu items used for both files and folders by examining one of the following keys in the navigation pane on the left:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFileSystemObjects\ShellEx
You’ll find context menu items specific to just folders in one of these keys instead:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers
You might find it handy to locate each of the locations of items in your context menu, and add them into your favorites list so that they’re easier to browse through later.
Let’s take a look at one item as an example, using VLC video player. When installed, VLC added a context menu item named “Add to VLC media player’s Playlist.” Let’s say you never touch it in your life, and would really rather it not be on the context menu.
Here’s how we get rid of that menu item. In Registry Editor, go to the following key:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\AddtoPlaylistVLC
You will see the “AddtoPlaylistVLC” key while browsing through the shell key looking for items to remove. Items under the regular “shell” key are usually really easy to spot and deal with.
You have a few options on how to handle this. You could just delete that “AddToPlaylistVLC” key entirely, and that would remove the item from the context menu. However, unless you back up your Registry—or export the key first and keep up with the REG file—it will not be easy to get back if you change your mind.
The second option is to disable the key instead of deleting it. To do that, just right-click the “AddToPlaylistVLC” key—or whatever key you’re working with—and choose New > String Value. Name the new string value “LegacyDisable.”
As soon as you create the “LegacyDisable” value, the change should be immediate. Right-click a file or folder in File Explorer and notice that the “Add to VLC media player’s Playlist” item has been removed from the context menu.
You also have a third option. If you occasionally use a menu item, but do not want it cluttering up your regular context menu, you can hide it away on the extended context menu you see only when you hold Shift while right-clicking a file or folder. To do this, right-click the “AddToPlaylistVLC” key—or whatever key you’re working with—and choose New > String Value. Name the new string value “Extended.” Now it will only appear if you right-click on a folder while holding Shift.
You have probably noticed that some of the common Registry keys listed at the top of this section have “shellex” (Shell Extension) in the name instead of just “shell.” You will need to handle those types of keys just a bit differently. As an example, let’s head down to one of those keys mentioned earlier:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers
The shellex items will be a little tougher to decipher, but you can usually figure out an item by the key name on the left. Here, we’re going to be working with the “DropboxExt” key inside the “ContextMenuHandlers” key.
When Dropbox is installed, it adds a “Move to Dropbox” command to the context menu. Let’s say that you do not want it to be there, because you do not use it. Now you have to get rid of it.
You can’t use the tricks with the “LegacyDisable” and “Extended” string values described above with shellex items. You could still delete the whole “DropboxExt” key to remove it from the context menu–and be sure to back the key up if you do–but there is a simple way to disable it. Just select the key on the left and then double-click the (Default) value inside that key to open its properties window.
On the properties window, in the “Value data” box, just modify the value that’s already there by putting a few dashes in front of it, being careful not to delete any of the existing value. That way, if you change your mind, you can just go back in and remove the dashes. When you’re done, click “OK.” The change will be immediate, so go right-click something in File Explorer and make sure the command is gone.
When it comes to shellex items, there are only options to disable or delete them, and no way to hide them on the Extended context menu the way you can with shell items.
If you want to remove context menu items that you only see when you right-click specific types of files, you can do that, too. These items are stored elsewhere than the common locations we’ve already looked at. To find them, you’ll need to first locate the file extension key by looking under “HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT” for that extension, which in turn will tell you the name of the key that you need to look for.
Just as an example, say you wanted to remove the menu item for opening an Excel document (XLSX) in Excel when you right click on it.You probably would not want to do this, but it is an easy example to look at here. Other applications may add different types of commands you don’t need.
You would start by taking a look at the following registry key for the XLSX extension:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.xlsx
The data column for the (“Default”) shell key lets you know that the actual type of file is “Excel.Sheet.12.”
Now, you can browse to that extensions key:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.12\shell
And now that you’ve located the correct “shell” key, you can use the same techniques we described in the previous section on “shell” items to delete, disable, or hide the item on the “Extended” context menu. Remember the “LegacyDisable” and “Extended” string values? Those work here, too!
Now that we have covered the hard way, let’s get into the easy way! Instead of editing the registry, you can download two tools from NirSoft to clean up your context menu. If you are wondering why two tools, specifically, are needed, it’s because one is for handling regular shell items, while the other handles shellex items. They are both much easier to use than editing the Registry, but the behind-the-scenes understanding of how these things are handled in the Registry will give you a better understanding in sorting through all the items these tools display.
Start by downloading both the tools. The first tool is ShellMenuView, which handles regular shell items. The second tool is ShellExView, which handles shellex items. Scroll down toward the bottom of both those pages to find the download links. The tools both work with pretty much any version of Windows from 98 all the way through 10. You will need to grab either the 32-bit or 64-bit version, depending on whether you’re running a 32-bit or 64-bit edition of Windows.
The first tool you will need to check out is ShellMenuView, which allows you to manage all of those regular shell items with an easy-to-use interface. After downloading and extracting the tool, double-click the EXE file to run it. It’s a portable tool, so there’s no installation.
In the ShellMenuView window, just browse down the list until you find the item you want to disable. You can only disable items with these tools—not delete them or hide them on the Extended context menu. And by the way, these tools disable items by creating a “LegacyDisable” string value inside the appropriate key—just like you did when you edited the Registry manually.
When you find the item you’re looking for, click the “Disable” button on the toolbar, or the little red dot at the top.
Another benefit of using these tools is that you can select multiple items and then disable them all at once. Using the earlier example of the VLC, when you disable the “Add to VLC media player’s Playlist” item only when you right-click a folder, you can easily select all of the “Add to VLC media player’s Playlist” items and then click “Disable” to remove that command from the context menu of all supported file types as well.
When you’re done removing shell items, the next step is to fire up the ShellExView tool and remove shellex items. This one works exactly the same way as the first tool. Just select one or more items and then click the “Disable” button to remove the items from your context menu.
This is a lot of information, especially if this is your first time editing your context menu. But it is worth it, having a personalized, cleaned up, and efficient context menu, tailored to your needs!
