The Windows 11 right-click menu, one of the most complained-about pieces of the operating system since 2021, is getting a settings page of its own. The customisation controls have been found hidden in the latest Windows 11 preview builds, and they let you switch individual actions on and off, change how cut, copy and paste are laid out, and get a shorter menu by default. Nothing has shipped to the public yet, and Microsoft has not announced it.
What the new Windows 11 right-click menu settings do
The feature was surfaced by the Windows watcher phantomofearth on 15 August, who posted a video demo and described a new Settings page that turns individual context-menu actions on or off. Windows Central’s Zac Bowden, who was helped to enable the flags, published a hands-on the same day.
In the build he tried, a Customize entry appears at the bottom of the right-click menu. Selecting it opens the Settings app. The toggles Bowden lists include:
- Send to — the classic submenu, on or off
- Create shortcut
- Copy as path
- Rotate image
- App extensions — entries added by installed third-party apps
- Arrange primary actions inline — the layout switch described below
- Keep cloud storage actions in their own section
The layout toggle is the one long-time Windows users will care about most. By default, cut, copy, paste, rename and delete sit at the top of the menu as a horizontal strip of icons. Turning off the inline arrangement puts them back in a vertical list alongside everything else, the way they appeared in Windows 10 and earlier.
phantomofearth summed up the change as: “There’s a new Settings page that lets you turn certain actions on or off, ‘Send to’ and Refresh for all folders are coming to modern context menus, and they’ll be simpler by default.” Send to and Refresh are two of the items that today still push people into the legacy menu.
A shorter menu, but Microsoft decides the starting point
The part worth reading carefully is the default. Bowden writes that in the preview build, most actions are switched off out of the box — the menu is fast because it is short, and it is up to you to go into Settings and add back anything you actually use. That is a reasonable trade for a menu that has been slow and cluttered for five years, but it does mean the first experience after this ships will be a menu missing things you had yesterday. Anyone who reaches for Copy as path or a shell extension from a third-party app should expect to re-enable it.
The legacy menu, reachable today through the Show more options entry, has not been retired, but nothing in this update lets you make it the default. For people who have spent years applying registry tweaks to bring the classic menu back permanently, that gap stays open.
When will it reach your PC?
Not yet, and there is no date. The controls are hidden behind feature flags in preview builds and had to be force-enabled to be tested, so they are not visible even to most Windows Insiders. Bowden says an announcement from Microsoft is expected within a week or two; neither he nor phantomofearth published a build number, and Microsoft’s own Insider release notes have not mentioned the feature so far. Treat everything above as a preview of unreleased work that can still change or be pulled.
It fits the wider pattern of the past month, though. Microsoft has already moved taskbar repositioning and Start menu customisation into Release Preview, reversing restrictions that shipped with Windows 11 in 2021. The right-click menu was the other long-standing grievance on that list.
Sources: phantomofearth on X, Windows Central
