Microsoft is going to let you get rid of the ridiculous Windows 11 context menu

There are many reasons for the slow uptake of Windows 11, but fairly high on the list of what puts off many potential users is the number of frankly bizarre design changes Microsoft decided to make. A good example is the context menu that appears when right-clicking on files and folders which the company saw fit to tweak the menu so there are far fewer options available.

It is possible to access the old style, classic context menu by Shift-right-clicking, but in a future update to Windows 11 Microsoft is planning to introduce a way to make this the default.

The good news is that there is no need to wait — you can do this right now. Assuming you already have the latest version of Windows 11 installed, you can tweak the registry to enable the classic context menu, but in the latest Dev build there is a new accessibility option that will — or at least should — eventually make its way to everyone.

As you can see from the tweet, if you install the handy ViVeTool utility, you can enable this now:

• Start by downloading the tool from GitHub
• Extract the contents of the zip file to, for example, C:\ViVeTool
• Open the Command Prompt with administrator privileges
• Type cd C:\ViVeTool and press Enter (changing the path if necessary)
• To enable the feature, type vivetool /enable /id:39696859 and press Enter
• Restart Windows
• To disable the feature, type vivetool /disable /id:39696859 and press Enter
• Restart Windows

As this appears to be an accessibility option, enabling and disabling the classic context menu is likely to become a simple toggle in Settings at some point in the future.