When Microsoft built Windows 11, they trimmed the right click menu right down. Most of the options you were used to seeing are now tucked away behind a Show more options link, which means two clicks instead of one for jobs you do dozens of times a day.
The good news is that you can have the old right click menu back, and Windows 11 will show it every time.
There are two ways to do it. One line pasted into Command Prompt takes about ten seconds. Or you can do the same job by hand in Registry Editor if you’d rather see what’s happening. I’ll show you both, and I’ll show you how to put it back the way it was if you change your mind.
The Short Answer
Click Start, type cmd and open Command Prompt. Paste in this line, press Enter, then restart your computer.
reg add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /f /veThat’s it. If you only want the old menu now and again rather than all the time, hold Shift while you right click instead, and change nothing.
What Changed in the Windows 11 Right Click Menu
The menu that pops up when you right click on something has a proper name. It’s called the context menu, because what appears on it depends on the context, in other words on what you right clicked. Right click a photo and you’ll be offered things you can do to a photo. Right click the desktop and you get desktop options.
In Windows 10 and everything before it, that menu showed you everything. Every option, from Windows itself and from any program you’d installed, all in one list.
Windows 11 shows a much shorter list instead. Cut, copy, rename, share and delete became a row of little icons across the top, a handful of common actions sit underneath, and everything else moved behind Show more options at the bottom.
Open the Old Right Click Menu Without Changing Anything
Before we go anywhere near the registry, it’s worth knowing that Windows 11 already gives you three ways to open the old menu. None of them change a single setting.
- Right click as normal, then click Show more options at the bottom of the menu.
- Hold down the Shift key and right click. The old menu opens straight away. This works in File Explorer and on the desktop.
- Click once on the file or folder to select it, then press Shift + F10 on the keyboard.
Shift and right click is the one I use most. It’s the same hand movement you’re already making, just with a finger on the Shift key.
Laptop Keyboards
On a lot of laptops the F keys double up as volume and brightness controls. If Shift + F10 does nothing, try Fn + Shift + F10 instead.
If you only need the old menu occasionally, you can stop reading here. There’s nothing to set up and nothing to undo later. Carry on if you want the full menu every single time without holding anything down.
How to Restore the Old Right Click Menu in Windows 11
To make Windows 11 show the old right click menu every time, you need to add one key to the Windows registry, with an empty subkey inside it.
That sounds worse than it is. The key goes into your own user account’s part of the registry, so you don’t need administrator rights, and it doesn’t touch anything else on the computer. Anyone else with their own Windows user account on the same PC carries on with the new menu. Delete the key later and Windows goes straight back to how it is now.
You can do it in one line, or you can do it by hand. Both do exactly the same job, so pick whichever you’re comfortable with.
Back Up First
Any time you’re going into the registry, give yourself a way back. Create a System Restore point, or at the very least spend two minutes backing up the registry.
Better still, don’t practise on your own computer at all. I keep a virtual machine for exactly this sort of job, a spare copy of Windows running in a window, where a mistake costs you nothing at all. That is why I use virtual machines and think you should too.
This particular change is about as safe as registry edits get, and it’s easily undone. But the habit is worth having, because the next registry guide you follow might not be.
The Quick Way, One Line in Command Prompt
This is the fastest way by a mile. It does exactly what the step by step section below does, it just does it in one go.
- Click the Start button and type cmd
- Click Command Prompt in the search results. You don’t need Run as administrator.
- Copy the line below, then right click inside the Command Prompt window to paste it in.
- Press Enter.
reg add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /f /veCommand Prompt should answer with The operation completed successfully. Restart your computer and the old menu will be there.
Type the line out by hand if you prefer, but there’s a long string of letters and numbers in the middle of it and one wrong character means nothing happens. Copying and pasting is the safer bet.
Don’t Want To Restart?
You don’t have to restart the whole computer, you only need to restart File Explorer. Paste both lines below into the same Command Prompt window and press Enter.
taskkill /f /im explorer.exe
start explorer.exeYour taskbar and desktop icons will vanish for a second or two and then come back. That’s supposed to happen, nothing is broken.
The Step By Step Way, Using Registry Editor
If you’d rather see what you’re doing, here’s the same change made by hand. You’re creating one new key, then one subkey inside it, and that’s the whole job.
Open Registry Editor
Click the Start button and type regedit
Click Registry Editor in the search results, then click Yes when User Account Control asks whether you want to allow it.
Find the CLSID Key
You’re heading for a key called CLSID. The quickest way to get there is to click into the address bar along the top of Registry Editor, paste in the line below and press Enter.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\CLSIDThat drops you straight onto it, and you can skip to the next step.
If you’d rather click your way there, start by clicking the small arrowhead beside HKEY_CURRENT_USER in the left hand panel.
A list of folders drops down. Scroll down and click the arrowhead beside Software.
Inside Software, expand Classes. That one contains a huge number of entries, so be ready to scroll.
Keep going down the list until you find CLSID. It’s well past halfway, and yes, it really is in capital letters. Click it once to select it.
Create the New Key and Rename It
Right click on CLSID, hover over New, then left click Key.
Windows creates the key and gives it a temporary name, New Key #1, with the name already highlighted ready to be changed.
Rename it to this, curly brackets and all.
{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}Copy and paste it rather than typing it. It has to be exactly right or nothing will happen, and it’s a lot of characters to get perfect by hand. Press Enter when you’ve done it.
Create the InprocServer32 Subkey
Now you need a second key, this time inside the one you’ve just made.
Right click on the new key, hover over New, then left click Key again.
Same as before, it arrives called New Key #1 with the name ready to edit.
Rename it to InprocServer32 and press Enter. Capital I, capital S, no spaces.
Check the Value and Restart
Last bit, and it’s really just checking your work.
- Left click once on InprocServer32 to select it.
- Double click (Default) in the right hand panel.
- Make sure the Value data box is completely empty. If there’s anything in it, delete it.
- Click OK and close Registry Editor.
- Restart your computer.
The empty value is the whole trick. You’re telling Windows that the component which draws the new menu lives nowhere, so Windows falls back on the old one.
The Old Right Click Menu Working in Windows 11
Once the computer has restarted, right click on anything. A file, a folder, the desktop, it doesn’t matter.
The full menu opens straight away. Every option, all in one list, no Show more options to click through. Open with, Send to, Properties, and whatever your installed programs add, all where they used to be.
Worth knowing, the old menu also brings back the extras. Hold Shift and right click now and you’ll get a few additional entries on top of the normal list, which is how it always worked in Windows 10.
While you’re in there, it’s a good moment to tidy up the Send to menu, since you can actually see it again.
How to Get the New Windows 11 Right Click Menu Back
You might live with the old menu for a fortnight and decide you preferred the tidy one after all. It happens more often than you’d think, particularly if you’ve got a lot of software installed and the old menu turns out to be enormous.
Going back is just a case of deleting the key you created. One line again.
reg delete "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}" /fOr do it by hand. Open Registry Editor, go back to the same place, right click the key called {86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2} and choose Delete. The subkey inside it goes with it.
Restart the computer, or restart File Explorer with the command further up the page, and the new menu is back.
What You Give Up with the Old Right Click Menu
Most guides won’t tell you this bit, so here it is. The old menu isn’t free, you do lose a few things.
- The icon row goes. Cut, copy, rename, share and delete stop being little icons across the top and go back to being ordinary text entries in the list.
- New features can pass you by. When Microsoft adds something to the right click menu these days, they add it to the new one. If you’re on the old menu it may not show up.
- Some modern apps behave oddly. Programs that add themselves to the new menu rather than the old one can end up with their entries in an awkward place, or tucked under a submenu.
- It can get very long. That’s the reason Microsoft changed it in the first place. On a machine with years of software on it, the old menu can run off the bottom of the screen.
None of that is a reason not to do it. I run the old menu on my own machine because I’d rather see everything. But if you’ve installed a lot over the years and the menu turns into a wall of text, now you know why.
One more thing worth knowing if you use Microsoft PowerToys. Several of its tools work from the right click menu, and on the new menu they hide under Show more options. Switching to the old menu puts them back in plain sight, which on its own is a decent reason to make the change. If you haven’t got it yet, here’s how to install PowerToys.
Windows 11 is Getting Right Click Menu Settings
Microsoft has finally accepted that people want some say over this menu.
In August 2026 they started testing a proper settings page for the right click menu with Windows Insiders. There’s a Customize menu entry at the bottom of the menu itself, which opens Settings, then Personalization, then Context menu. From there you can:
- Show cut, copy, paste, rename, delete and share as text entries instead of that row of icons, the way Windows 10 did it.
- Move Properties down to the bottom of the list, where it always used to live.
- Turn built in entries like Send to, Print and Create shortcut on or off.
- Decide whether entries added by your programs appear in the main menu or get tucked into a submenu.
Here’s the honest bit, and it’s the part most articles are glossing over. None of it makes the old menu the default. Microsoft’s new settings tidy up the new menu and make it feel more like Windows 10, but the full old menu is still behind Show more options, and the registry change on this page is still the only way to have it open every time.
It’s also not on normal PCs yet. As things stand it’s in the Experimental channel of the Windows Insider Programme, on a 26H2 preview build, which means it’s months away from ordinary machines and could still change. If you want to have a look at it now without touching your main PC, that’s exactly the sort of job a virtual machine is for.
I’ll update this page when it reaches everybody.
Troubleshooting the Windows 11 Right Click Menu
Nothing Changed After the Restart
Nine times out of ten it’s a typing mistake. Open Registry Editor and check these four things, in this order.
- The key name matches exactly, including both curly brackets. One missing character and it does nothing.
- The subkey is spelled InprocServer32, and it’s inside the key you created, not sitting next to it.
- The (Default) value inside InprocServer32 is empty.
- You’re in HKEY_CURRENT_USER, not HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. Look at the address bar at the top of Registry Editor.
If you’re not sure, the simplest fix is to delete the key and run the Command Prompt line instead. It can’t misspell anything.
You Made the Key in the Wrong Place
This catches people out. There is more than one CLSID key in the registry, and the others look identical in the left hand panel.
The one you want is the one at this address, and nowhere else.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\CLSIDDelete anything you created in the wrong spot, then start again from the address bar.
The New Menu Came Back on its Own
A big Windows feature update can occasionally clear the key out. If you sit down one morning and the short menu is back for no reason you can see, that’s usually what’s happened.
It’s not a problem, just run the Command Prompt line again and restart. Takes ten seconds. Worth keeping the command somewhere you can find it.
The Right Click Menu is Slow or Won’t Open At All
That’s a different problem and this change isn’t causing it. A right click menu that takes a few seconds to appear, or hangs File Explorer altogether, is almost always one badly behaved entry added by an installed program, usually cloud storage or antivirus software.
The quick test is to start Windows in Safe Mode, where none of those extras load. If the menu is fine in Safe Mode, you know it’s a program rather than Windows, and it’s a case of working out which one.
You’re Actually on Windows 10
Then there’s nothing to do. Windows 10 has always shown the full menu, and this change does nothing on it.
Not sure which you’re running? Press the Windows key + R, type winver and press Enter. A little box tells you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. Is it safe to edit the registry to change the right click menu?
A. Yes. This change adds one key to your own user account and nothing else. It doesn’t alter any Windows files and it’s undone by deleting that same key. That said, make a System Restore point before any registry work, because it’s a good habit to be in.
Q. Do I need administrator rights?
A. No. The key goes into HKEY_CURRENT_USER, which is your own part of the registry. You’ll still see a User Account Control prompt when Registry Editor opens, because the program itself asks for it, but the change applies only to you.
Q. How do I get the old right click menu without using regedit?
A. Hold Shift while you right click, or select the item and press Shift + F10. Both open the old menu immediately with nothing to set up. If you want it every time without holding a key, use the Command Prompt line on this page, which makes the change without opening Registry Editor.
Q. What is the right click menu actually called?
A. The context menu. It’s called that because its contents change depending on what you right clicked, so a file, a folder and the desktop all offer you different things.
Q. Does this change the right click menu in Chrome, Word and other programs?
A. No. It only affects the Windows menu you get in File Explorer and on the desktop. Programs draw their own right click menus and this doesn’t touch them.
Q. Does it still work on the latest version of Windows 11?
A. Yes. It’s worked in every version of Windows 11 so far, including 24H2 and 25H2. Microsoft could close it off in future, and if that happens I’ll update this page.
Q. Will a Windows update undo it?
A. Ordinary monthly updates leave it alone. A big feature update, the sort that changes the version number, occasionally clears it out. If the short menu comes back, run the command again.
Q. Does it affect other people who use the same PC?
A. No. Each Windows account has its own settings, so anyone else signing in to the same computer keeps the new menu. They’d need to make the change themselves under their own account.
Q. Should I download a .reg file to do this instead?
A. I wouldn’t. Plenty of sites offer one, and a .reg file is just a text file that writes to your registry when you double click it, which means you’re trusting a stranger with write access to Windows. The Command Prompt line on this page does exactly the same job and you can see every character of it before you run it.
Summary
Getting the old right click menu back in Windows 11 isn’t difficult. One key and one empty subkey in the registry, and Windows stops hiding your options behind Show more options.
If you only want it occasionally, don’t bother with any of it. Hold Shift while you right click and you’ve got the same menu with nothing to undo later.
And if you’re at all nervous about the registry, do what I said further up and try it on a virtual machine first. That’s exactly what they’re for. You get to see it work, and if you make a mess of it, no harm done.
Setup a Home Network in Windows
Setting up a home network in Windows 10 or Windows 11 lets you share files and folders between all your desktop PCs and laptops
Access documents, pictures and any other files that are stored on a different PC to the one you’re using right now.
You can find this and other related step by step guides in – At Home Computer Guides