Add Any Program to Explorer Right-Click Menu

This little trick can be found a thousand places online. I wanted to share it for my own safe-keeping.

1. Open Regedit.
2. Expand to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell
3. If the “shell” key doesn’t exist, create it.
4. Add new key to “shell” and name it what you want displayed in the menu, such as “Open Notepad++” or whatever.
5. Right-click the new key and create another key named “command”.
6. Double-click the default entry and type the path to the command. Put the path in quotes and then add “%1” after the quote. It might look like this: c:\program files\some\thing.exe” %1

After those steps, simply refresh the desktop by hitting F5. Now when you right-click any icon, you should see your new entry. I often use this trick to add various programming tools, text editors, Photoshop, and more.