When Windows 11 was released, everyone was so excited to try its new user interface. But pretty soon we learned about the newly designed context-menu that hides all the common functions. The new simplified menu was not really liked by many people and new tools to bring back the classic context-menu such as StartAllBack started to appear on the internet. Now there is another tool called Nilesoft Shell that aims to make it very easy to edit and extend the context-menu on Windows 11. Nilesoft Shell also works on older versions of Windows such as Windows 10 and Windows 8.x.
Nilesoft Shell makes it extremely easy to extend the context menu with some new functions on Windows. The user does not have to worry about the inner workings of the operating system. It integrates itself in the File Explorer context-menu and can also be accessed from the Windows Desktop. We can use it to embed custom commands in the context-menu easily. For example, we can add links to custom commands, files, folders, applications and even websites in the context-menu.
Nilesoft Shell comes in a portable ZIP package. We can start by extracting the contents of the downloaded ZIP file to a folder, right-clicking on the shell.exe file and choosing Run as administrator. This will open a small window from where we can click on the Register in order to register the Nilesoft Shell extension in the system. After registering, we have to restart Windows File Explorer too.
Shell comes with a bunch of items already added in the context-menu, but we can add or remove items by editing its configuration file. In order to edit its configuration file, we have to right-click on the Taskbar and choose config from there. This will open shell.shl file in Windows Notepad for your editing.
But how do we have to edit this shell.shl file? The developer has created a lengthy document which is available online and it describes all the syntax about editing this configuration file, adding and editing menus and sub-menus in the Windows context-menu. In the following screenshot, we have added TrishTech.com website in the menu.
Nilesoft Shell extension can add all sorts of items in the context-menu. It is a really useful, lightweight and convenient solution for modifying or removing any context menu item. We can even add various images, glyphs, bitmaps and colors in the menus to make them look just like the natural Windows 11 menu.
While testing Nilesoft Shell, we found out that it does not work when we have other similar context-menu modifiers installed. We could not get it to work without first uninstalling StartAllBack from the Windows 11 system. When needed, Nilesoft Shell can be removed from the system by clicking on the Unregister button after launching shell.exe as administrator.
You can download Nilesoft Shell for Windows from https://nilesoft.org/.
I have added all Adobe softwares in the right clicking menu. Thank you !!
im using it on my office pc… everything works good but editing the file is not easy.
You will find it difficult at the beginning of use, but with practice you will find it easy. In version 2 a user interface will be created to simplify editing.
Thank you for this article.
Shell is now being developed to be compatible with StartAllBack and will be available in the next release.