Create Textless Desktop Icons and Shortcuts with Enhanced Context Menu

Martin Brinkmann
Mar 29, 2008
Updated • Dec 5, 2012
Software, Windows software
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That's probably the longest title that I've ever selected for an article here at Ghacks. A default Windows desktop contains several icons that have special "abilities" which stand in contrast to the shortcuts that users can create. If you take the Internet Explorer icon for example you notice that a right-click opens up a menu with lots of options like opening the Internet Options or starting Internet Explorer.

I'm going to show you how you can create such icons and shortcuts by yourself. I'm using an icon as an example that will have options to load all installed browsers on the system. You do need the software SCCU [via Neowin Forum] for that. Four default icons are shown when the tool is started for the first time, they are Computer, Control Panel, My Documents and Network Places. It is possible to edit the options of those items or create a new one.

Select File > New to create a new icon and click on the New button next to Class Name. Make sure you pick something unique, I did pick Browser for this example. Clicking on Accept should display Browser in the left pane, click Finished to finish this process. Now begins the fun part of the process.

It is possible to change the icon for that newly created icon by clicking on the folder symbol next to Class Icon.

A click on the Class Type tab lets you choose the location and type of the icon. Possible locations are Desktop, My Computer, Control Panel, Entire Network, Network Places and No Namespace. There are five types of icon available for you to choose from, they are: Icon, Folder, Shortcut, Shell Object and Existing Folder. My decision was to place a textless icon on the Desktop.

The final tab called Menu Item lets you drag and drop shortcuts and files to it which are then added to the context menu of the Browser icon. The form fields will be filled out automatically when a file or shortcut is dropped in the menu. The first dropped file or shortcut will the default left-click action for that icon.

I have added three browser to the right-click menu of the icon. All that is left to do is to click on the Class > Merge option in the menu which immediately creates the file on the desktop. If you can't see it refresh your desktop.

That was just a pretty basic example but it used all the important elements to create textless icons with an enhanced context menu. You should save the new icon finally, otherwise it will be saved in untitled.ini. This file is important in case you want to delete the icon again from the location that you placed it in because a normal delete operation is not working.

Update: The file is no longer available. I'm unfortunately not aware of an alternative at this point in time.

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Comments

  1. Vv00t said on April 17, 2009 at 5:52 pm
    Reply

    thanks so much for the step-by-step, just what i was looking for, and worked like a charm (although for some reason the icon picture i chose only appeared after i did the process twice ;)

    thanks again.

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