How to Edit the “New” Entry in the Right-Click Menu in Windows 10

This tip shows you how to edit the items that appear in the “New” column that no one uses in the Windows “right-click” context menu.

When you right-click in a blank part of the Windows File Explorer, one of the options in the menu that appears is “New”. You can select one of the items in that section to create a “new” folder, a “new” text file, a “new” shortcut etc. It can actually be pretty helpful, if you don’t have a giant list of things cluttering it up.

Using a free and time-tested tool you can remove the useless entries in the “New” section of the Windows ‘Right-click’ menu. Even though the App hasn’t been updated since 2013, it works perfectly with Windows 7, 8 and 10.

1. Start out by downloading ShellNewHandler. Open the .zip file and extract the file ShellNewHandler.exe to your Downloads folder. The program doesn’t need to be installed – so just double-click it to start.
2. Windows will probably prompt you with a “User Account Control” message – just click the Yes button. ShellNewHandler is completely safe to use – in fact, it’s open source – so you can look at all of the code to see exactly what it does.
3. Once it opens it will display a list of all the items in your “New” menu. Simply remove the checkbox from each item that you do not want displayed.
4. When you’ve made your selections, click the Apply button and then the OK button.
5. Ta-da! Your menu is that much more neat and tidy now :)
6. If you ever want to add an item back, or you install a new Program that adds itself to the menu and you want to remove it too, simply run ShellNewHandler.exe and you can edit the “New” section of the right-click menu again. That’s it!

If you want to really customize the “right-click” menu, check out our guide on using FileMenu Tools.