Menu map

The Menu map shows the right-click menu for a place you choose, item by item: the items from your Shell configuration and the items Windows and your installed programs add. For each item it tells you where it comes from and which rules change it. You can also hide, rename or move items from here.

Open it from the sidebar: Menus > Menu map, between Context Menus and Menu Builder.

Choose a place

The switcher at the top chooses which right-click menu is shown:

Refresh reads the menu again, for example after you install a program or edit a file by hand.

What the page lists

The menu is shown in two groups:

• Your Shell items: the items and submenus from your configuration, in the order they are written. Each one shows its file and line, for example imports/file-manage.nss:12.
• Windows and other programs: the items Windows and your installed programs add. Each one is labelled with who added it: Windows, or the program's name, such as 7-Zip. Unknown means Shell couldn't tell.

To read Windows' items, Shell builds the same menu Explorer would build, off-screen. For a file it uses a sample file in %TEMP%\NilesoftShellPro\menu-map; for a folder, that folder; for a drive, your system drive. No window or menu appears, and no item is run. For the folder background and the desktop, the list also has the items the folder window adds itself, such as View, Sort by, Group by, Refresh and Paste.

The taskbar's own menu is built by Windows itself, so for the taskbar only your Shell items are listed.

Tags

Small tags next to an item show what your rules do to it:

Outline and Nodes

Two views show the same menu:

• Outline (the default) is a list. Click a submenu to expand or collapse it, or use Expand all and Collapse all. Each item has its switch on the row.
• Nodes shows each open menu as a panel, from left to right, with a line from the item that opens a submenu to that submenu's panel. Click a submenu item to open its panel. Drag or scroll to move around.

The item's details

Click an item to see its details at the right:

Hide, rename or move a Windows item

This works for items from Windows and from other programs.

1. Select the item.
2. Turn off In the menu to hide it. Or type a new title under Rename, or pick a menu under Move to. The list has your Shell menus, such as File manage or More options, and Windows submenus, such as Send to.
3. The footer at the bottom of the window counts the change. Click Save, or Discard to drop your changes.
4. Right-click again to see the result.

To undo a change made here, turn the switch back on, or use Use the original title or Put it back where Windows has it, then save.

Some items can't be changed this way:

• An item hidden by a rule in your own configuration, such as one in imports/modify.nss. The panel names the rule and links to the Context Menus page, where that rule has a switch.
• An item whose title changes with what is selected, such as 7-Zip's Add to "name.7z". A rule can't name it, so the panel suggests the Config Editor.

Change one of your Shell items

Changes to your own items are saved right away, without the footer.

• Turn off In the menu to hide the item. The page adds vis=vis.remove to that item's line; turning the switch back on removes exactly that. If the item already has its own vis, the switch can't be used and the panel suggests Edit code.
• Rename changes the item's title.
• Edit code opens a small editor with just that item's code, or the whole menu block for a submenu, with syntax colours. Check and save checks the whole configuration with Shell, takes a snapshot, and changes only that part of the file. The rest of the file stays the same, byte for byte.
• Open in the Config Editor opens the file at that line.

To move one of your items, use Edit code or the Menu Builder.

What it writes

For the curious: hiding, renaming or moving a Windows item writes a modify or remove rule. When Shell knows the item's Windows id, the rule uses it, so it works in every Windows language:

remove(where=this.id==id.cast_to_device)

Otherwise the rule uses the item's exact title.

These rules go into their own file, imports/settings-app-map.nss. It is imported near the top of shell.nss, before the other configuration files, so it also works for items the bundled modify.nss already moves. Hiding Send to is one example.

The Context Menus page lists these rules under imports/settings-app-map.nss, each with a switch, and lists the file as the module Menu map.

Where your changes are saved

• Rules for Windows items go to imports\settings-app-map.nss. Changes to your own items go to the file the item is written in. Only files in your configuration folder (%APPDATA%\Nilesoft\Shell) are changed.
• Before writing, the configuration is checked with shell -config:check. A configuration Shell would reject is not written.
• Each save first takes a snapshot in Backups.
• If Explorer uses the shared configuration in the program folder, the page is read-only and offers Create personal config. Program Files is never written to.

Limits

• Rules that depend on the selection or the window are marked may. The page doesn't decide them.
• mode conditions are not tested.
• Your Shell items are listed in config order, apart from Windows' items. In the real menu Shell places them with pos when the menu opens.
• The modify.remove.duplicate setting is not applied in the map.

Troubleshooting