How To Add An Application To The Right Click Menu Of The Desktop

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Normally, whenever you right click on the desktop then you get the standard option like View, Sort By, New and others. However, sometimes it makes a lot of sense to create a shortcut to an application by adding that application to the right click menu of the desktop. Think of it as an additional way to quickly access your most frequently used applications. This can easily be done by implementing the Registry trick below:

Step-1 Open the Windows Registry.

Step-2 Browse to the following Windows Registry key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\Shell

Step-3 Right click on the Shell key in the left panel and create a new key and name it whatever you want to display in the right click menu. For example, if you want Sky to show up in the right click menu, then the name of the key that you create under Shell should be Sky. In this example, I am going to add paint to the right click menu so I will create a new key with the name paint.

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Step-4 Now right click on paint and create another key called command.

Step-5 On the right hand side panel, double click on the (Default) String value and in its data field, enter the path name of the application you would like to start when somebody clicks on the paint context menu option. In this case, I am going to go ahead and type the path name C:\Windows\System32\mspaint.exe:

Step-6 Now when I right click on my desktop, a new menu item called paint has been added to the context menu:

Step-7 When I click on the paint option, then obviously Microsoft Paint will start on my computer.

Step-8 To remove PAINT from the right click desktop menu, all you need to do is simply delete the new keys that you created. As simple as that!

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