How to bring back Windows 10’s context menus – Guide
As part of Windows 11’s full aesthetic update, Microsoft has created a new right-click context menu that is larger and easier to read than Windows 10. Depending on what you right-click, the context menu now includes a row of icons for basic actions like copy, paste, and delete, which used to get a little lost in all the other commands that cluttered up the classic context menu. It’s a good idea in theory – the problem is that the Windows 11 context menu now hides some functionality you might want behind ‘Show more options’ button, which brings up an entirely different context menu. Bwuh? Here’s an explanation of what’s happening with the new Windows 11 context menus, and how to go back to classic context menus if you don’t like them.
Why Windows 11 Context Menus Have Fewer Entries
You know how programs love to insert themselves into their context menu, but some deserve this place more than others? I love the 7-Zip context menu integration, for example, because it allows me to easily unzip files to the current directory or to a new one with just a right click. But others drive me crazy and make my context menus a real pain to navigate – I don’t want Dropbox, Windows Media Player or Cast to Device there because I don’t use any of them features regularly. Any Windows installation older than a year is guaranteed to have a messy and inefficient context menu unless you deliberately select it with a program like ShellExView. Microsoft knows the context menu sucks. “The menu is exceptionally long. It has grown up in an unregulated environment for 20 years, since Windows XP, when IContextMenu was launched,” Microsoft said in a blog this summer. The post highlights many issues here: insufficient grouping of commands, an overly long menu, and much more. Windows 11 aims to fix the problem. As the blog explains, the menu has been reorganized to better separate the basic Windows context menu stuff from the application-specific stuff like my 7-Zip example. But part of that redesign means that the way apps fit into the context menu is different, which means developers will have to release updates that take that into account. So now, on launch, the Nvidia Control Panel shortcut does not show up in my context menu unless I click “Show more options” to reveal the old menu. The good news is that apps can still access the new context menu. In fact, someone has already forked 7-Zip to update it specifically for Windows 11. So the Windows 11 context menu isn’t ruined and any functionality you’ve gotten used to over the years will likely be back in little time unless you use some old and no longer up-to-date software. But if you really don’t like the redesign or can’t wait for these updates to restore your context menu to full functionality, it’s pretty easy to revert to classic context menus now.
How to restore classic context menus in Windows 11
If you hate having to dig into “Show more options” in your context menu to do something you used to be able to do in Windows 10 much more conveniently, here’s the trick to fix Windows 11 context menus.
- Open Regedit by pressing the Windows key and typing regedit. Press Enter to start it.
- Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER Software Classes CLSID
- Right-click > New > Key and paste this name: {86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}
- With the new key you just created highlighted, again right-click > New > Key and paste this name: InprocServer32.
- Double-click the registry entry (Default) and press Enter without typing anything to set its value to blank. Before making this change, you will see in the Data column that it says (value not set), but when you press Enter, it will not show anything.
- Close Registry Editor. To see your 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 type explorer.exe to restart the Windows explorer process. And that’s it: context menus changed!
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