Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Customizing your Right-Click Menu commands!

Sometimes when I right-click there are some options that I always hope will be there, but they never are! Luckily I found a program that allows me to put whatever commands I want into my right click menu. And let me tell you, it is SO convenient! It is called FileMenu Tools and can be acquired here. The site will automatically prompt you to download it so go ahead and save the install file.

So you may be thinking that adding a whole bunch of commands will just make your right-click menu HUGE, but actually all of the commands that you add manually will be under one submenu called ‘FileMenu Tools’ so it won’t change the appearance much. Scroll to the bottom to see what this looks like if you can’t wait!

In the following example I will create a custom command for ‘Play in iTunes’ to appear in my right click menu. I have tons of songs in my iTunes library so I have my default music player set to WinAmp so that I can play random files without loading my whole iTunes library. Sometimes I do want to play in iTunes and rather than go through the whole ‘Open with’ menu and deal with that I will simply create my own command to do so. And it is really easy. Once installed, ‘FileMenu Tools’ will always be running to provide you with your custom right click options, but when you want to create your own commands you will need to open the program itself. Here is what the user interface looks like:



How to create a Command:
With FileMenu Tools UI open click on the ‘Add Command’ button in the ‘Actions’ tab that looks like this:



Now you will notice that the information tab (below) displays some information and that a ‘New Command’ appears in the ‘Commands of FileMenu Tools’ tab on the right.



In the information tab you will see a variety of text and blank cells. The cells in the left column tell you what you can customize and the accompanying cells to the right are where you enter your information. To create a ‘Run program’ type command you only need to use 3.

1.)The first is ‘Action’ which is defaulted to ‘Run Program’ so you need not change anything.
2.)The next is ‘Menu Text’ which will display how your command appears in the right click menu. I clicked in the cell immediately to the right of ‘Menu Text’ and typed ‘Play with iTunes.’


3.)The third item that matters in further down in the list under the Information tab so scroll down to ‘Program’ and click in the blank cell to the right of it. Three dots will appear (…). Click on these dots and windows explorer will open and you will need to identify the program that you want to open with this command.


I tracked down ‘iTunes.exe’ and then clicked open. ***If you need helping finding your program you can search for it in the search bar at the top right of the Windows explorer bar***



Now all you have to do is click the ‘Apply Changes’ icon at the top left window of FileMenu Tools to accept the changes and your command will automatically be added to your custom right-click menu.



Here you can see my new command that I added in my right click menu that wasn’t there before:



What else FileMenu Tools can do:
There are five command types which let you make specific actions. This actions are:
• Run an external program, whose arguments are the selected elements.
• Copy the selected elements to an specific folder.
• Move the selected elements to an specific folder.
• Delete specific file types into the selected folders.
• Send the selected elements to mail recipients with specific parameters (e-mail recipients, subject and body).

You can do with as many different commands as you would like. Once you have done this once it will be very easy to do it multiple times to create all of your own shortcuts and make your computing life much more convenient! I will shortly be making a Tiggity on how to reduce the size of your right click menu so that it looks cleaner. If you have any questions feel free to email me @ bendavisadams@gmail.com

I would like to thank SnapFiles for providing an awesome and constantly updated list of great software with short reviews and ratings.

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