On a new installation of Windows, the right-click menu (also called Contextual menu) is relatively clean and organized. However, as you install software on your computer, it will gradually become a mess. Indeed, a large number of software programs add features to the context menu that are supposed to save you time… but maybe some of these options do not interest you at all!
For example, in the screenshot above, my context menu is filled with quite a few shortcuts – many of which I’ve never used and never intended to use. Let’s see how to clean up that right-click menu!
Clean the context menu in Windows
To do this, we will use two small free utilities that do not require any installation: ShellMenuView et ShellExView.
ShellMenuView lists all the menu items registered on your system and allows you to disable them individually. If you can't find an item with ShellMenuView, then you'll probably find it with ShellExView, which is for shell extensions.
To get started, download ShellMenuView (the operation is the same for ShellExView). Extract the archive and launch the .exe file.
ShellMenuView will launch and you will see a pretty phenomenal amount of menu options. Grayed out are the ones that are disabled and white are the ones that are enabled.
As you can see, there are an impressive amount of entries for the right-click menu. In fact, depending on the type of file you right-click on, the options change… hence the name context menu.
In this long list, you can fortunately do a search by clicking on the icon with a magnifying glass and a leaf. For example, I want, in my case, to deactivate the option " Add to VLC playlist » for all media files.
Once located in the list, I select the lines that interest me, I right-click and I select " Disable Selected Items". Of course, it is possible to reactivate these options in the same way, but by selecting " Enable Selected Items"
And voila !
You will be able to clean up your context menus little by little by removing everything that is not essential! In addition, if your computer is not in the first youth, this should help to marginally improve its performance!
Both programs are portable (no installation required), so you can carry them wherever you go on a USB stick for convenience.
Did you know this trick? Which context menu items do you use the most and which ones will you remove for good? Let us know in the comments!
Article updated on January 24, 2021 by Byothe
