A simple Rust library for managing Windows context menu entries.

Installation

cargo add win-ctx

Basic example

The following code creates a top-level context menu entry that appears on right-clicked folders and opens the target folder in the terminal.

use win_ctx::*;

CtxEntry::new_with_options(
    "Open in terminal",
    &ActivationType::Folder,
    &EntryOptions {
        command: Some("cmd /s /k pushd \"%V\""),
        icon: Some("C:\\Windows\\System32\\cmd.exe"),
        position: None,
        extended: false,
    }
)?;

Advanced example

The following code creates a context menu entry with child entries that each open the target folder in the selected program.

To reduce line count, the more basic non-options functions can be used, and individual values are then set on the resulting entries.

use win_ctx::{CtxEntry, ActivationType};

let mut parent = CtxEntry::new("Open directory in", &ActivationType::Background)?;
parent.set_extended(true);

let mut child_1 = parent.new_child("Terminal")?;
child_1.set_command(Some("cmd /s /k pushd \"%V\""))?;
child_1.set_icon(Some("C:\\Windows\\System32\\cmd.exe"))?;

let mut child_2 = parent.new_child("Powershell")?;
child_2.set_command(Some("powershell -noexit -command Set-Location -literalPath '%V'"))?;
child_2.set_icon(Some("C:\\Windows\\System32\\WindowsPowerShell\\v1.0\\powershell.exe"))?;

Errors

Because this library manipulates the Windows registry, code must be executed as administrator or any other user with sufficient privileges.

Errors will have an ErrorKind of either:

• PermissionDenied for insufficient privileges, or
• NotFound for operations on missing keys and values.

It should also be noted that fool-proof one-to-one parity is not possible between this library and the Windows registry. There are cases where in-scope entries can be thrown out of sync, so care should be taken when manipulating, for instance, parent-child entry relationships.