Discussion on:

Quick Tip: Add Open with Notepad to the right-click menu

What other applications would you add an Open With for on the right-click menu?

No need to mess in the Registry for this. Just add a shortcut to Notepad in the "Send to" folder in your Start menu. I've done that on my Windows systems for years.

Which is easy to do and no "registry hacking" required:

(1) [WindowKey] + [R] : open the execute box
(2) Shell:sendto : open the sendto folder

Using the [WindowKey] + [R] : Notepad or Wordpad ... is also a quick way to open them for a new document, much quicker than driving the mouse through menus.

First, thank you for taking your time to explain this tip to all of us Jack. This is a great alternative. I have a question.

How would you create a custom sub menu and put all of your custom commands in there? For example, "My Custom Commands->Open With Notepad, Open with Command Prompt" etc pretty much like "Send To" but instead you have a custom one?

I tried the logical by creating a separate folder/registry key and putting all new "Key Name->command" in there but I don't get a sub menu.

I'm using sendto as right click:
Just add shortcut to notepad, wordpad or any program to (hidden) folder:
C:\Documents and Settings\%user%\SendTo\

And you have it similar way

First thing I do after installing Windows is add a shortcut to Wordpad in EVERY SendTo folder in the Users (or Documents and Settings) folder. Once you have added it to SendTo in the Default (or Default User) folder, it will automatically appear in every new profile created on that machine.
Wordpad can open MUCH larger text files. And can open most binary files, which may help determine its purpose (i.e. what app installed it) by finding embedded ASCII text characters.

Jack is writing on windows? Could it be that Linux is slipping?

At least that explains why he chose to do this with a registry hack LOL.... welcome to the windows world Jack - you don't have to hack your way through it...

Rather than editing the registry, I'd suggest using the free (for personal use) OpenExpert from BaxBex.com OpenExpert provides a bunch of other useful facilities for opening applications and assigning extensions to apps and.....

1. Windows Explorer --> add a link to SendTo folder into SendTo folder
2. Windows menu --> on the link to any application (e.g. Notepad) --> right click --> SendTo --> SendTo
3. On any file --> right click --> SendTo --> Notepad

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How you do it for Windows xp

I use:
notepad.exe "%1".

I also usually specify the full path the program in shortcuts. In this case it is C:\Windows\notepad.exe. The path may change if C:\Windows is not the %WINDIR% location.

the obvious question is that since this is relatively simple WHY MICROSOFT DID NOT ALREADY DO IT and allow us to customize it without risking system stability by reg edits
and without requiring system admin rights.

To get to the SendTo folder, you???ll need to open up an Explorer window, and then paste in the following to the address bar.

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo

%APPDATA% is an environment variable that actually maps to something like C:\users\\AppData\Roaming.

You should now see a bunch of shortcuts there. Let???s say you wanted to add an item to the Send To menu to open files in Notepad. You could just drag a shortcut to Notepad into this folder, or create a new shortcut. Now you can see the new Notepad item in the menu. You can actually put in any other shortcuts, or even a folder.

Another 'Send to' I use is Notepad++. I consider the Notepad++ manatory if you do any kind of programming in any language. It is free (GNU). I use it along side Dreamweaver or other programming IDE's so I can copy data back and forth. It recognises different code syntax in different programming langauges and appropriately highlights key words in different colors. It also allows opening different files in differernt tabbed windows. It remembers and opens up all the files you had open the previous time. Very good for working on large projects where you are working on many/different files/typs. PHP files, HTML, text, Java, vb, C, etc. You can learn more and download for free at: http://notepad-plus-plus.org/.

As far as adding programs to the "send to' menu, In Windows XP, all I had to do is add a shortcut for the application to the "Send to" folder. In Vista, I get "Access is denied". When I try to use the run command: Shell:sendto :, I get a message ...not found in Vista.

Also, I remember it was either Windows 98 or XP Microsoft power toys had a "Send to" feature where you could add programs to the Send to menu.