Windows 11 reworked many of the fundamental interfaces that we use day in and day out, and only a few changes were more controversial was the right-click context menu. It is difficult to customize, harder to declutter, and changes elements we’d been familiar with for decades.
Fortunately, there is an application available that allows you to create totally new items and functions for the right-click context menu.
Who wanted tiny buttons?
Windows 11’s new context menu looks cleaner, but it hides multiple options that I use regularly. The old menu let me find basic actions with a single click, and now I have to hunt for them.
I’ve tinkered with registry tweaks to change how the right-click menu works, but updates often reset those changes, and they’re difficult to do well. The real issue isn’t the aesthetic shift but the lack of control over what appears in the menu.
The Windows 11 right-click context menu has been a bit controversial since it was released; fortunately, a third-party program allows you to customize it however you’d like.
Custom Context Menu enables you to create new entries in the right-click context menu that can access any application on your PC. If you want to build a menu item that uses FFmpeg, you can do that. If you want to use a PowerShell argument on a file, you can do that too.
In many ways, it is a bit like having a Batch script built right into your right-click menu.
How to Write a Batch Script on Windows
If you have a task you do repeatedly, writing a simple Batch file can save you a ton of time.
The app technically says it costs 99-cents, but it is actually free. You can keep using the trial forever, but you could also pay the 99 cents to support the developer.
In many ways, the Custom Context Menu is better than the context menu that existed in Windows 10.
Even though Windows 10 was easier to customize than Windows 11, you were still basically stuck with the options that were added by applications. If you wanted to add an item, you had to manually tweak the registry and write a script.
Custom Context Menu allows you to accomplish exactly that with almost none of the technical trouble.
When you first launch Custom Context Menu, you’re met with a blank screen and no instructions.
To begin, click the Add button in the middle of the screen. Once you do that, you’ll get a rather busy screen that allows you to specify what you want the button to look and act like.
So, let’s say I wanted to add an option that calls FFmpeg and extracts the audio from a video file. There are a few steps:
- Set the name of the shortcut
- Specify what program to call
- Define the parameters that pass to the program
In this case, I’m going to pass a command to Command Prompt rather than calling FFmpeg directly. You can call a program, but I’ve found that outputting to the Terminal via cmd makes it easier to troubleshoot my custom entries if they don’t work.
My final command looked like this:
Running it is as easy as right-clicking a video file.
You’re only limited by your creativity
I’ve mostly used Custom Context Menu to automate command-line tools that I use a lot, like FFmpeg, but it isn’t really limited to that.
If you want, you could use it to:
- Resize images using your favorite editor
- Convert files between formats without opening an app
- Sort files into pre-defined folders
- Scan a file with a security tool of your choice
- Rename files using a consistent format
Once you get your menu items setup, the main advantage is speed. The command-line isn’t terrible if you’re used to it, but right-clicking and then selecting one menu item is always going to be faster.
It isn’t often that an application adds a feature as useful as this. Windows has always struggled to make the right-click menu customizable, but this application makes it completely painless.
However, until such time as Microsoft adds it to Windows, I’ll keep using this app.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
