The Windows Explorer is a comfortable tool with which to manage your files. Although it lacks some features, most users would rather live without those features than install a third-party file manager. One way to improve the functionality of Windows Explorer is to enhance the context menu. This has already been achieved by many applications, but Microsoft has yet to come up with an easy way for the average user.
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The program FileMenu Tools fills this gap. It creates a new item in the Context Menu of Explorer and opens up various possibilities for customizing it. If you choose the item FileMenu Tools Configuration in the Context Menu of the tool, a GUI will pop up where you can comfortably make your personal adjustments.
Now I want to provide a short overview of the included tools. Their values differ a lot, though, but some of them are very useful. In the following overview, I will concentrate on the most recently added tools. For those familiar with the CLI, there exists the possibility to open a tool at the current location or execute a program and pass some arguments to it. Another handy function is the Folder Synchronization option.
The program features an entry for shredding files, which makes them unrecoverable by recovery programs. It also includes a useful renaming utility.
For more advanced users, FileMenu Tools also offers users the possibility of registering or unregistering *.dll or *.ocx files.
Those previously-mentioned tools are sure to be helpful, but the most outstanding feature of FileMenu Tools is that you can add new tools. For this purpose, it offers five so-called actions: run a program, move to, copy to, delete specific file, and send to mail recipient. I find the “move to“ action to be tremendously helpful. My download and documents folders often get cluttered after some time, so manually moving the files to the archive folders requires lots of mouse clicks. Now I can just make a “move to“ entry for each of my archive folders in the FileMenu Tools. With this great tool, I can archive those files without manually navigating through the directories, which significantly reduces the amount of clicks used for file management.
With the action "run a program," you can add your favorite tools to Explorer's Context Menu. Various options are available for defining the program call. You can submit arguments and set a working folder. You can also restrict the availability of your added tool. You can define it’s context so that it only appears in the list when, for example, it is invoked on *.jpg files lying on a removable drive.
Besides providing users with the opportunity to alter their own entries in the Context Menu, it also includes a GUI to alter the "send to“ settings and the commands of other applications. Both options are nice bonuses, because you have one GUI to change the complete Context Menu. But for me, they have a rather limited use.
All in all, the tiny application FileMenu Tools adds a lot of wealth to Explorer’s file management capabilities. After you have personalized and worked with it for a few days, you will instantly miss it if you have to work on a computer where it isn't installed.
Love this handy utility… free, 32 and 64-bit, powerful customization. I found it a while back when searching for a very simple GUI way to synchronize directories. Love this site, keep em coming!
Oh Happy Day! I have my folder size shell menu back! This works great with Windows 7 (I would assume Vista too,) and from the right click menu I can see all my folder sizes at once, with a pie graph. Cool!