Idea: Hide Items From Right Click "New" Menu

With the addition of the very convenient feature to disable shell extensions, I was thinking it would be nice to be able to hide items from the "New" (aka 'Create File') menu when right clicking.

I know these items are added via the registry, but at least in the case of the Google Drive desktop app, if you remove the entries (such as SOFTWARE\Classes\.gdoc\ShellNew for the "Google Docs" item), it simply adds itself back. I even tried changing the permissions on that registry key so the program couldn't add it back, but soon realized that it checks every single minute whether the registry items are there, and when it can't it add them back it causes an annoying refresh of the desktop every time. Not sure if there's any other software that automatically adds itself back but I wouldn't be surprised.

Anyway I figured it might be a nice addition also for people who don't want to dig through the registry to remove entries. Perhaps even later even more functionality could be added to add custom items too.

3 Likes

Definitely makes sense!

At the moment, I tackle it the other way around, since I usually only want to create a small number of types. I hide the New menu entirely and make explicit items for the types I want.

E.g. FileType NEW=.txt