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Explorer right click menu without right clicking?

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skwire:
thanks for all the great replies. My main problem is that I work with VPN drives-folder-files alot and mouse right click on those folders can be quite painful and slow because I think Windows tries to cache the files or does some other thing I do not know. So I am hoping to bypass the way Windows does the right click and just get the damn right click menu without prior processing. At least that is my basic idea.
-kartal (March 24, 2010, 11:10 AM)
--- End quote ---

In that case, I don't think any solution is going to help you much.  Whether you bring up the context menu via a legitimate right-click or programmatically via the ShellContextMenu() method I linked above, you're still bringing up the same context menu.  Short of finding a misbehaving shell extension, I would think it's going to take the same amount of time no matter which way you do it.

kartal:
skwire, sure I understand that. But think about this  scenario: you have explorer open and you are under a VPN folder. Now you want to delete a folder you have couple options,

select the file-right click-delete which take the longest
select the file, just delete
select the file and use the delete icon in the explorer pane either on top or on the side.

So obviously one would go for the 2nd or 3rd option. If one can access the functions on the shell menu without invoking it, then no needfor dealing with the right click menu

I guess what I need is then a pseudo explorer menu with explorer functions that does not use Windows shell context

AndyM:
Are there many context menu choices you need?  Or do you mostly use Delete and one or two others?   If so, maybe some specific keyboard or mouse shortcuts would be a different approach.
select the file, just delete
--- End quote ---
for example, I have Delete assigned to a mouse rocker gesture (left click-middle click).  So in this case after selecting the file I'd delete it like that, no menu or keyboard required.

Or you could make a custom menu with the commands you want in a macro program.  I've no experience with this but at least one if not both of the macro programs I use (Macro Express and AutoHotkey) can do this.

MilesAhead:
If it's okay to be hotkeys rather than mouse I have something already coded that might be useful.  It's called Selector.  You can see a screen shot on this page:

http://www.favessoft.com/hotkeys.html

It's kind of an oddball launcher using selected text or clipboard text.  If you have a file or folder highlighted in Explorer the param sent to the program you launch from the list will be the complete path of the selected file/folder.

Since it really has nothing to do with Explorer, just the clipboard, you wouldn't invoke the context menu overhead.  You populate the ListBox by dragging either programs or shortcuts onto it.  It then prompts you for a short name to put in the ListBox.

It has a mechanism to select from a list of hotkeys.  I haven't worked on it for awhile to add any mouse hotkeys.  One novel feature, if the selected text should have spaces it has a custom Go button that wraps the param in quotes to avoid the "c:\program " not found business.

edit: I wrote Selector mainly to click in a browser address bar and open with a different browser without using plugins, or pick up selected text from an editor etc...  but for your purpose you probably want something that would cycle through multiple selections in the clipboard.  Selector is designed to really work with a single item.  The same principle should adapt to an ahk script though.. maybe a small GUI with a few buttons for common tasks.

kartal:
Thanks for the additional suggestions. It looks like I will try building a
custom menu for myself.

The delete example was a simple one. Obviosuly I can just use delete. But I
have other shell menu stuff that I rely on when I am using any folder, like
copying paths, running a cygwin bash shell, running a searcher from that
particular folder etc etc. So I am just afraid that some stuff cannot be just
put on a menu but I will try

@MilesAhead
I will check out Selector to see what it is offerng, it might be a good start
for me..

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