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The Windows Context Menu – Is It a Lost Cause?

enderman.ch

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Re: The Windows Context Menu – Is It a Lost Cause?

#21

Post by somat »

The first time I used the context button intentionally was when I got around to binding it as the compose key.

As a bit of a tangent the X11 compose system is a really great way to enter less often used characters. Here is a bit of a tutorial, note this is probably openbsd specific.

in ~/.xsession bind the context key

  xmodmap -e 'keysym Menu = Multi_key'
in ~/.XCompose include the locale specific compose dir(in my case this is /usr/X11R6/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose) and set up some of your own

  include "%L"
      : "\xf0\x9f\x95\xb8" # spiderweb
Now hit the menu key then w then e then b and you get a nice spider web

Re: The Windows Context Menu – Is It a Lost Cause?

#24

Post by kalleboo »

joegibbs wrote: post #15

If it was up to me I'd make adding options to the context menu something that you can't do without specifically choosing to in the control panel. Applications could supply context options to the OS but those shouldn't be displayed without the user going in and allowing each one specifically.

Funny enough Microsoft has already had this battle with the Start menu https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030903-00/?p=42...

Re: The Windows Context Menu – Is It a Lost Cause?

#25

Post by samtheDamned »

nxobject wrote: post #20

As an aside, Enderman gets up to wild Windows shenanigans on his YouTube channel – things like getting Windows 11 to run on a P4, jailbreaking Windows S mode, etc. It's some fun light entertainment if you're into that sort of tinkering.

Wanted to say this too. They have a really good knowledge of ways to dig into Windows and I look forward to future blog posts

Re: The Windows Context Menu – Is It a Lost Cause?

#26

Post by NoPicklez »

kalleboo wrote: post #24
joegibbs wrote: post #15

If it was up to me I'd make adding options to the context menu something that you can't do without specifically choosing to in the control panel. Applications could supply context options to the OS but those shouldn't be displayed without the user going in and allowing each one specifically.

Funny enough Microsoft has already had this battle with the Start menu https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030903-00/?p=42...

That's a great little blog post

I forgot about what the torrent of links that would find themselves in the IE favourites page

Re: The Windows Context Menu – Is It a Lost Cause?

#27

Post by justsomehnguy »

kalleboo wrote: post #24
joegibbs wrote: post #15

If it was up to me I'd make adding options to the context menu something that you can't do without specifically choosing to in the control panel. Applications could supply context options to the OS but those shouldn't be displayed without the user going in and allowing each one specifically.

Funny enough Microsoft has already had this battle with the Start menu https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030903-00/?p=42...

Funny enough the program what did found the way to add itself to the pinned list on the Task Bar is.. Google Chrome.

Re: The Windows Context Menu – Is It a Lost Cause?

#29

Post by hulitu »

observationist wrote: post #9
cududa wrote: post #2

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The Windows context menu is... poorly made." That website is poorly made. What's with the scrolling. Anyway. Yes. It's a very very complicated software with hooks decades back. That's a feature not a bug. He's mad that it's complicated to customize, or really, understand and build UI customization for, including third-party applications implementations of them? What? People still use mission critical software from 3…

I've never seen a good, reasonable use for scrollbars being made available to screw around with. If you build websites, don't muck up basic UI elements like the scrollbar, or go full screen, or do horizontal scrolling, or take over scrolling behaviors. Stuff like this site seems like half art project, half social experiment. I'm not sure the article author should be speaking with such certainty and authority on the s…

> If your interface gets in the way of things being done, then the interface is the wrong tool for the job.

Tell that to Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Apple. They either never heard of it or they don't care.

Re: The Windows Context Menu – Is It a Lost Cause?

#30

Post by wink »

suddenclarity wrote: post #17
DustinBrett wrote: post #7

NirSoft's ShellExView & ShellMenuView are good tools for tweaking that menu.

I'm surprised something similar isn't already part of PowerToys. It seems to be a common complaint, with software cluttering it. Chrome browser even more so since they introduced a randomly scrolling menu so one can't even see all the options.

Modern powertoys have jumped the shark, it's now a single tool with many functions that puts itself into autostart and has nagging autoupdates.

I still had the old version (like sysinternals) in mind, a collection of small hassle free tools.

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