Have you ever wanted to add an option to that ornery right click context menu so you could open whatever file you just clicked on with whatever the heck you please? I know I have, and here is a quick tip to do just that! Whether it’s your favorite text editor, or another app that you want for some reason, you can easily add an Open With option to the context menu by modifying and then importing this registry file.

What you see inside this file is a registry key where we will put the value, don’t change that except for the last section which is where you want to name the menu item. Then below that you will put the actual path to the application. Be sure to note that we have double slashes in the path, that’s not a mistake, that’s required. Take a look at the registry file template:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\Open with My Program\Command]
@="C:\\Program Files\\Program Dir\\program.exe \"%1\""

That should make sense to you when you look at it. All you have to do is change two things:

Change “Open with My Program” to whatever you want. If we were setting this up for my favorite text editor, notepad++ it could be “Open with notepad++”.

Change the program name and path to whatever it needs to be. If I have my notepadd++ in C:\files\notepad-plus\ it would look like this: “C:\\files\\notepad-plus\\notepad++.exe”.

The end result would look like this:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\Open with notepad++\Command]
@="C:\\files\\notepad-plus\\notepad++.exe \"%1\""

See the difference? Once you have the file the way you want it, simply save it and then right click on it. You will see an option that says Merge, choose that one and let it import into the registry. You can simply double click on it in most cases, but that doesn’t always work. Enjoy!

**NOTE: These changes are instant and non reversible, so be careful. I am not responsible if you do something silly and turn your system into a brick or otherwise mangle your machine.