Add items to desktop right-click menu in Windows 7

When you right-click on the Windows Desktop, you see a popup menu which shows various options you can choose. You can also add your own custom shortcut to an application, a command or website URL to the right-click menu of the Desktop. Here is how :

  1. Press the key combination Windows logo key + R to open the Run dialog. Type Regedit.exe in the Run dialog and press Enter. This would open the Registry Editor.

  2. Navigate to the following Registry key in the Registry Editor :
    HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTDirectoryBackgroundshell
  3. Right-click on the key shell and select New → Key to create a new subkey.

    Give any unique name to the subkey you want. In this example, we have given a name google.

  4. Change the default value of the newly create key to what you want to see in the Desktop right-click menu. In this example, we changed it to Google

  6. Right-click on the this new key google (or whatever you named it) and select New → Key to create a new subkey. This time give the subkey a name command. Then change the default value of this newly created subkey to the command you want to run when someone selects it from the Desktop right click menu. In this example we want to open the Google webpage, so we change the value to :
    cmd /c “start http://www.google.com/”

  7. That’s it. Now you can see the new item appear in the right-click menu, when you right-click anywhere on the Desktop. When you select Google, it will open the Google webpage.

We have just seen how to add a shortcut to a website to the desktop’s right-click menu. You can also change the value to open two websites. If you want to open both Google and Yahoo using the same shortcut, then change the default value of command subkey to :

cmd /c “start http://www.google.com/ && start http://www.yahoo.com/”

Now when you select the new menu item, it will launch both the websites in your browser. Similarly, you can modify the value to open more sites using the same single shortcut.

You can use the same method to add a shortcut to any application like Windows Notepad. If you want to add shortcut to an application then you would have to change the default value of command subkey to the full path of the application. For example, to add a shortcut to Windows Notepad, the default value of command should be c:windowsnotepad.exe. But, as this application is inside a system folder, you can just put the value to notepad.exe as shown.