How to call the context menu of the computer object. What is the Windows context menu and how to customize it. Using additional context menu commands

In this manual, about several free and simple ways find duplicate files on your computer in Windows 10, 8 or 7 and delete them if necessary. First of all, we will talk about programs that allow you to search for duplicate files, but if you are interested in more interesting ways, the instructions also touch on the topic of finding and removing them from using Windows PowerShell.

What is it for? Almost any user who saves archives of photos, videos, music and documents to their disks for a long enough time (it does not matter, internal or external storage), there is a high probability that duplicates of the same files are "formed", taking up extra space on the HDD, SSD or other drive.

DupeGuru is another great free program for finding duplicate files in Russian. Unfortunately, the developers have recently stopped updating the Windows version (but are updating DupeGuru for MacOS and Ubuntu Linux), however, the version for Windows 7 available on the official website http://hardcoded.net/dupeguru (at the bottom of the page) works fine on Windows 10 as well.

All you need to use the program is to add folders to find duplicates to the list and start scanning. Upon completion, you will see a list of found duplicate files, their location, size and "percentage" by how much this file matches any other file (you can sort the list by any of these values).

For example, in my case, one of the recently tested programs, as it turned out, copied its installation files to the Windows folder and left it there (1, 2), taking away my precious 200+ MB, the same file remained in the downloads folder.

As you can see in the screenshot, only one of the found samples has a mark for selecting files (and only it can be deleted) - in this case, it is more logical to delete not from Windows folders(there, in theory, the file may be needed), and from the downloads folder. If the selection needs to be changed, mark the files that do not need to be deleted and then, in the menu of the right mouse click - "Make selected as a template", then the mark for selection will disappear from the current files and will appear in their duplicates.

I think you won't have any difficulty in understanding the settings and other items of the DupeGuru menu: they are all in Russian and quite understandable. And the program itself searches for duplicates quickly and reliably (the main thing is not to delete any system files).

Duplicate Cleaner Free

Duplicate Cleaner Free is another good rather than bad solution, especially for novice users (in my opinion, this option is easier). Despite the fact that it is relatively unobtrusive to offer to purchase Pro version and restricts some functions, in particular, the search for only the same photos and images (but filters by extension are available, which also allows you to search only for pictures, you can search only for the same music).

As well as previous programs Duplicate Cleaner has a Russian interface language, but some elements appear to have been translated using machine translation. Nevertheless, almost everything will be clear and, as mentioned above, working with the program will most likely be very simple for a novice user who needed to find and delete identical files on the computer.

You can download Duplicate Cleaner Free from the official website https://www.digitalvolcano.co.uk/dcdownloads.html

How to find duplicate files using Windows PowerShell

If desired, you can do without third-party programs to find and remove duplicate files. I recently wrote about how in PowerShell this same function can be used to search for duplicate files on drives or folders.

At the same time, you can find many different implementations of Windows PowerShell scripts that allow you to find duplicate files, here are some options (I myself am not an expert in writing such programs):

Below in the screenshot is an example of using a slightly modified (so that it does not delete duplicate files, but displays a list of them), the first script in the images folder (where there are two identical pictures - the same ones that AllDup found).

If creating PowerShell scripts is a common thing for you, then I think that in the above examples you can find useful approaches that will help you implement the search for duplicate files in the way you need, or even automate the process.

Additional Information

In addition to the above programs for finding duplicate files, there are many other utilities of this kind, many of them are not free or limit their functions before registration. Also, while writing this review, we came across dummy programs (which pretend to be looking for duplicates, but in fact only offer to install or buy a "main" product) from fairly eminent developers who are on everyone's lips.

In my opinion, freeware utilities for finding duplicates, especially the first two of of this review are more than sufficient for any actions to search for identical files, including music, photos and pictures, documents.

If the above options seemed to you not enough, when downloading other programs you found (and those listed by me too), be careful when installing (in order to avoid installing potentially unwanted software), or even better -.

Every Windows user knows that regardless of the program, with the right mouse button, you can call up an additional, so-called context menu, which contains a set of special commands and links. Let's try to figure out what it is for and how to work with it correctly.

What is the Windows context menu

Speaking about the context menu of "operating systems" of the Windows family, I would like to immediately note the fact that it is not an exclusive development of Microsoft Corporation. Mac OS X or Linux also has such an element.

In general, if you understand what is context menu, it can be described as an additional set of commands for quick access to some function, say, without calling a specific application or control.

So, for example, everyone knows that the context menu always contains the "Open with ..." command, after which a list of the most suitable applications for working with the file is displayed. You yourself understand how much more convenient it is to open a file here than to invoke the program, and then go to the "File" menu and use the "Open" line or the key combination Ctrl + O.

In addition, in addition to commands, there is also a set special tools with which you can learn many things. But more on that later.

Appearance and organization of the context menu

Let us now consider how the contextual windows menu 7. Probably everyone has noticed that the menu itself contains special dividers in the form of thin horizontal lines. The point of their application is to differentiate between actions or commands of the same type that belong to the same program.

Here it is worth paying attention to the fact that the context menu in a, so to speak, "clean" system, immediately after installation, can be very different from what the user will see after installation additional programs and utilities. This is due to the fact that many installation packages integrate quick access commands to some of their main functions directly into this menu during the installation process.

Most of all, this concerns antivirus software, media players, programs for working with disk images, archivers, etc. In principle, the user can add his own items to ensure the convenience of work.

Additional menu on the desktop and in program windows

Surely, every user paid attention to the fact that the context menu in different programs or on the same desktop differs in the list of items and commands. It is natural. For example, if you call the menu on the desktop, it becomes clear that the "Open" line used for folders and files is not needed there. Another thing is when the mouse button is clicked on a shortcut or saved file located exactly on the desktop.

As it is already clear, in different programs the context menu can also contain dissimilar items. V this case it all depends on the specifics of the application. Compare at least a regular Explorer and text editor Word. But for now, we will talk about the "native" commands of the Windows OS.

The main items of the context menu

Drop-down menus are present almost everywhere, even in the main Start menu. In any of them, you can see some items marked with arrows. This is to show that the clause itself contains additional subclauses.

As usual, for files and folders at the very top there is always the "Open" command, highlighted in bold... When you click on this line in relation to the files, they will be opened in any program. You need to know that selection occurs only if the application itself sets the file association with this particular program. Otherwise, using this command will only result in the system prompting you to review and select the most suitable application. If several programs are associated with a file, you can use the "Open with ..." line, which will contain a list of programs that work with the extension of the file you are looking for.

It goes without saying that in the context menu of the same Explorer there are commands like "Copy", "Delete", "Cut", "Paste", "Send", "Rename", "Create shortcut", etc. Even a child knows this. On the other hand, there is also the "Properties" line, the use of which provides the user with complete information about the used object.

So, for example, when you call such a command when you click on the computer icon on the desktop, you can get general information about the main parameters computer system and the installed "operating system". For the desktop, the context menu mainly provides only the use of settings and synchronization options for folders with shared attributes.

Some menus also provide tools for administering or inspecting selected items.

Using additional context menu commands

Now let's talk about some additional commands. If you give an example installed antivirus, you can notice that the context menu will always contain lines like "Scan" or "Check with ...". Agree, it's very convenient.

The same applies to archivers, because you can add a file (folder) to the archive or extract it from there with one click.

Many media players behave in a similar manner, integrating their own commands into the system context menu. Most often, add to playlist or playback items (video and audio) appear here for multimedia files, and for graphics, this is a view command. In general, it all depends on which program integrates its own into the menu command lines, and what objects are associated with it.

Adding and removing commands in the system registry

So we got to the solution of the problem - how to add our own items to the context menu. This can be done in several ways. In this case, you can offer at least three options. Two of them relate to editing system registry, and one is the use of specialized utilities.

In the system registry, you can use the addition of keys, but if you do not know which keys and their values ​​are responsible for a particular process, you can waste a lot of time, achieve nothing in the end, and bring the system to a state of complete inoperability.

Therefore, let's consider the simplest way to work with the registry. First, in the Run menu, you use the regedit editor access command. Here you need to go to the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT section, find AllFilesystemObjects, then shellex and finally ContextMenuHandlers.

In the last section, an additional menu is selected by clicking the right mouse button and the command for creating a new object and key "New" and "Key" is executed, respectively. Now you need to enter a name for the newly created key, which will be displayed in the context menu, after which we select the "Change" command and in the overview indicate the location of the program or application that will be responsible for the new action. We confirm the choice and reboot the system.

Deleting the keys in this section will cause the corresponding command from the menu to disappear. But if you do not know which key is responsible for what, it is better not to change the default configuration.

Using the Context Menu Tuner

However, as practice shows, nobody really wants to rummage through the registry (you never know what can happen). Therefore, you can advise special utilities to add and remove items to the OS context menu.

One of the simplest, but very functional, is a utility called Context Menu Tuner. It will help you quickly change the menu beyond recognition. Everything is simple here. The main window includes two panels. The left contains commands, the right contains folders and basic parameters. As it is already clear, there is nothing easier than selecting the desired command and using the button to add it, say, to the desktop menu. Removal is performed by the opposite action.

Some additional options... First, you can select a file extension, and only then associate the corresponding command and program with it.

Changing the context menu access button

By default, the context menu button is the right mouse button by default. It is very easy to swap the buttons and call the context menu by left-clicking. To do this, you need to go to the mouse settings in the Control Panel and make the necessary manipulations. That's all.

You will need a small Right Click Enhancer utility. It offers an impressive list of commands that can be used to supplement the context menu of any Windows versions starting with Vista.

After launching Right Click Enhancer (if you are confused by the English-language interface, click Language → Russian to switch to Russian), you will see a set of tools, each of which makes its own changes to the context menu. Let's consider the most interesting of them.

Right Click Tweaker

With the Right Click Tweaker tool, you can add almost two dozen to the context menu useful commands... Here are some of the most notable ones.

• "Copy to" opens a window for selecting a folder into which you can copy the current object.
• "Move to" acts like the previous command, only does not copy, but moves the object.
• "Copy to Path" saves the path to the current object to the clipboard. This option can save time if you need to, for example, upload an image to a website or graphics editor... You just paste the path to the file instead of manually specifying it.
• "New folder" creates a folder directly from the context menu, while the standard windows way requires you to first go to the "Create" submenu, and then select "Folder".
• "Control Panel" opens the corresponding section with system settings.

To add a command to the context menu, just check it with a checkbox.

Unfortunately, some of the Right Click Tweaker options do not work correctly with Cyrillic characters yet. Therefore, a command like "Copy Content", which saves the content to the clipboard text files, it is better to use only with English-language texts.

New Menu Editor

The context menu contains the "Create" item. By default, it can be used to quickly create objects of several types: Text Document, folder, shortcut and others.

You can significantly expand this list with objects of other formats thanks to the New Menu Editor. It is enough to run this tool and mark the required file types with a checkbox. To exclude from the list objects that you do not plan to create, mark them with a cross - they will disappear from the Create submenu.

Send to manager

If you right-click on a folder or file, the "Send" item will be displayed in the context menu. It contains a small list of folders and programs into which you can export the selected item for storage or playback.

The Send To Manager tool will allow you to expand this list. To add a new directory to the context menu to which you will send objects, start Send To Manager and click Add Folder. If you want to add a program, click "Add File" and select its icon.

All folders and programs added in this way will appear in the "Send" submenu.

Right Click Enhancer Professional

This tool is only available in the paid version of the program. For $ 10, you can add shortcuts to the context menu for quick access to programs, files and folders, and create and customize submenus. All other features listed in the article are available for free.

The context menu can be cleaned manually through the registry, but this task is not trivial, since the entries are scattered in different places. In addition, it is not always easy to identify the correct registry key. For example, drivers are registered with the abbreviation "igfx". Registry entries are scattered across the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT branch in the shell or shellex folders, which contains a folder called ContextMenuHandlers, which also includes individual parameters.

Shortening the context menu through the registry utility

It will take a long time to manually process the lines of the context menu. It is much easier to use the ShellExView program. Only system options should be changed through regedit.

To find items from third-party programs in ShellExView, sort the results by the "Company" parameter and find "Context Menu" in the "Type" column.

Free utility ShellExView will compile a single list of all these registry lines. Even on a relatively fresh system, their number can exceed 250. In order not to get lost in them, after starting the program, the recordings should first be sorted. Things will go well if you click on the line "type" at the top of the window. Thus, you will immediately see all possible entries in the registry, related, for example, to "Context Menu". But be careful: along with them, the utility will display the lines from the Shell, which it is better not to touch.

Sorting can also be done by the "Company" parameter. In this case, the results will be sorted in alphabetical order - the records generated by the system and labeled as "Microsoft" are easy to distinguish from the rest. Here you can, for example, select the corresponding igfxDTCM Module and disable it by clicking on the red dot at the top of the menu bar. After that, a note about the (almost useless) graphics options Intel drivers disappears from the context menu. However, for the system to apply these settings, you must first log out and then log back in. Alternatively, you can disable "explorer.exe" through the Task Manager and then call this service again.

Changing system items of the context menu

Most of the lines in the context menu are created by the system itself. Among them are also options that are not used by anyone, which, however, I would not like to accidentally activate by mistake. You cannot simply get rid of them through the ShellExView program - you will have to manually modify the registry.

A good example can serve as the "Send" item, which Windows displays every time the user clicks on a file or folder. Do not forget that some of the sending options do not meet today's needs: the default is generally set to "Fax Recipient".

To remove this item from the menu, in Regedit go to “HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT | AllFilesystemObjects | shellex | ContextMenuHandlers | SendTo ". In the right window, double-click the parameter "Default" and in front of the long sequence of characters in curly braces, put a modest minus sign "-" to turn it off. As always, you need to log out of Windows and log in again.

Right-click menus are called contextual menus because their content depends on context — in other words, which program you are in and which object you clicked on. File utilities, many free programs and other applications, to make it easier to use them, often add their commands and entire sections to context menus. This is done, in particular, WinZip archivers and WinRar as well mail clients Outlook Express and The Bat !, which add packing and sending commands to the context menus of files. e-mail as attachments.

Unfortunately, the more such programs are installed, the longer the context menus, the more clutter they are, and the more difficult it is to find the required command. The situation is aggravated by the fact that many programs, especially free ones, are guilty of the fact that the context menu commands created by them remain even after the programs themselves are uninstalled.

However, some utilities provide convenient ways setting and deleting context menu commands. This is the best and the most reliable way putting things in order. But if there is no such function in the program (or if you managed to remove it), the composition of the menu can be changed using the Windows system registry.

However, before going into the registry (which is not always safe), let us consider several of the most common programs, which provide not only the creation of context menu commands, but also the possibility of their safe removal.

WinZip archives

The popular archiving utility WinZip adds several commands (such as Add to Zip) to the context menus of files or selects them in the WinZip submenu. To configure these commands, run WinZip in "classic" mode (not in wizard mode) and select the Options> Configuration command. In 8.1 and later, go to the System tab under Explorer Enhancements. In order not to rummage too long in search of the desired command, in these versions you can turn off the Display context menu items in a submenu mode - and then the archiving commands will be placed in the main menu, as in previous versions WinZip.

To change individual commands, select or deselect the corresponding items in the Context menu command section. By turning off the Display icons on context menus mode, you can leave the commands on the menu, but remove the icons.

Finally, to completely exclude WinZip commands from the context menu, turn off Use shell extension (in versions 7 and 8) or Enable Explorer enhancements. However, keep in mind that if you do this, you will lose the ability to extract the contents from the archive by dragging it with the right mouse button, and you will not be able to replenish the archive by dragging and dropping files onto its icon.

Customizing context menu commands created by the popular WinZip archiver

Winamp music

The free Winamp media player adds three commands to the folder menu: Play in Winamp, Enqueue in Winamp, and Add to Winamp 's Bookmark list. To remove them, open Winamp and select Options> Preferences, or right-click in the program window or panel and select the same command from its own context menu. A picture of the hierarchical menu structure appears on the left side of the window. In the General Preferences section ( Common parameters) select the File types branch - more earlier versions it's called Setup - and turn off Show Winamp in folder context menus in Windows Explorer(Show Winamp in Explorer folder context menus) or, in earlier versions, Directory context menus and click the Close button.

Explorer context menus

In Windows 2000 and XP Pro, you can use the Group Policy tool ( Group policy). Suppose we want to remove the Manage command, which launches the Computer Management administration tool, from the My Computer context menu. To do this, select Start> Run, type gpedit.msc and press Enter. A window will open with a hierarchical tree of commands displayed in the left pane. Go to Local Computer Policy \ User Configuration \ Administrative Templates \ Windows Components \ Windows Explorer, double-click on Hides the Manage item on the Windows Explorer context menu, select Enable (Enabled) and click the OK button.

This utility is also launched by Start> Programs> Administrative Tools> Computer Management and if you select Start> Run, type compmgmt.msc and click OK.

To remove the entire folder context menu in Windows 2000, navigate to the Windows Explorer icon in the left pane and double-click on Remove Windows Explorer's default context menu. In Windows XP, you need to select the item of the same name, activate the Enable mode and click on the OK button.The next time you right-click on the folder located on the desktop or on the icon in Explorer, nothing will happen - however, the context menus of other objects, toolbars such as toolbars will still work.To undo these changes, simply return to the dialog box described, select the Not configured mode and click OK.

In Windows 9x, to edit the context menu for a specific file type, open the My Computer window and select View> Folder Options. The Folder Options dialog box opens. If you go to the File Types tab, select the file type you want and click the Edit button, another window will open - Edit File Type. This window has several useful functions, in particular, you can change its icon or description. But the main thing is that at the bottom of the window there are those of the context menu commands that can be changed, and a series of buttons for this: Remove, Set Default, as well as Edit and New.

As you can see, context menu commands can not only be deleted, but also created. True, for this it is necessary to be aware of certain agreements adopted when drawing up such commands. You can, of course, read smart books on this topic. However, for educational purposes, you can use free program with a set of ready-made contextual commands. It's called Send To Toys and is located at http://www.gabrieleponti.com/software. Many of them, such as passing the file name and path to the clipboard, are useful on their own - but even more as a visual aid for writing your own context menu commands.