Is the right-click context menu on your Windows PC slow to show up or cluttered with many items or shortcuts you probably never use? What’s worse, the list grows as you install more apps on your computer. It seems like every app is fighting for a piece of your context menu. Some programs are clever enough to add or remove these options from its Preferences or Settings menu, notably the WinRAR. You can choose which items to include or exclude in the context menu during the installation process. If you did not enable its Shell Integration when installing the software or want to customize its items from context menu, you can achieve that from its integration settings. See how you can remove WinRAR options from context menu here. Many other apps however does not allow users to do that. VLC media player is another favorite app of mine. It can play most video and audio files and formats. When right click on media files or folders the “Add to VLC media player’s Playlist” and “Play with VLC media player” show in the context menu. However I never use them. So rather than cluttering the context menu, it is much better to remove both of these options. It has the Windows Explorer integration we can refuse during setup. However no such option or setting in its preferences. We can open Regedit, then manually find and delete shell menu or context menu items from there. If you don’t want to manually edit registry directly, use a third-party tool instead. HiBit Uninstaller is highly recommended. It is free to download and use. No registration required. You can even download and use its portable version so you don’t have to install it on your computer.
More features about HiBit Uninstaller for Windows
As its name implies, HiBit Uninstaller is designed to help Windows users delete stubborn software, Windows apps or browser extensions on computer. Except removing software from your computer, this free program also provide us many other useful tools, such as Windows Store Apps Manager, Program Components Manager, Windows Update Manager, Browser Extension Manager, Registry Cleaner, Junk Files Cleaner, Empty Folder Cleaner, Shortcuts Cleaner, File Shredder, Process Manager, Startup Manager, Service Manager, Schedule Task Manager, Context Menu Manager, System Restore Manager, Backup Manager, etc.
How to remove items from right-click context menu in Windows?
As we mentioned above, HiBit Uninstaller has many extra tools. Context Menu Manager is just one of them. We can use this free tool to quickly delete, remove items from the right-click context menu on Windows PC.
Run the program on your PC. Click Tools from its upper right corner, then choose Context Menu Manager from the drop-down menu. The Context Menu Manager displays which items are on your context menu and gives you control over them. If it is not a Windows entry or shortcut, click Hide Microsoft Entries option to hide those entries created by the OS and display only entries created by user installed programs.
To hide an item from Windows File Explorer context menu is really easy. Simply click to deselect an entry in the list or right click on it, then choose Disable from the context menu, it will then be disabled and hidden in the right-click context menu. If you want to delete an item from the context menu, right click on it and choose Delete from the pop-up menu.
The former is to create a new string value and name it LegacyDisable in Windows Registry. The Context Menu Manager does it for you automatically so you don’t have to edit the registry manually. By doing so the items is still in the shell menu, just not being displayed. If you want to show the item or shortcut in the right-click menu again, simply click to select it in the list and the option will make its way back to the right-click menu. The latter is to delete the item from Windows Registry.