SmartSystemMenu is an open source tool adds useful options to every window

SmartSystemMenu is a handy little application for Windows that adds useful context menu options to nearly any program. It is an open source program that works on Windows XP and above; it requires the .NET Framework 4.0 or above and supports 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows.

Download the latest version of the program from the Sourceforge project website and unpack the downloaded archive to the local system. Run the executable file; it needs elevated rights as it adds menu options to other programs and offers some functions that require elevation as well.

To access the SmartSystemMenu, right-click on the taskbar of the window of an application. The context menu lists nine options: Information, Always on Top, Save Window Screenshot, Copy Text To Clipboard, Resize, Alignment, Transparency, Priority, System Tray.

The Information option displays details about the current window including the process' location, name, or caption. You may find it helpful if you quickly want to find out where the executable (EXE) of the program is located.

Always on Top lets you pin a window on top of other windows. I think that PinWin does a better job at this than SmartSystemMenu (due to the limitations listed at the end of this article). Nevertheless, it does work well in programs that don't have their own menu and supports pinning multiple windows.

The Save Window Screenshot is a priceless option; it lets you capture the content of a window in a single click. No need for print screen or to open a screenshot tool. The screenshots taken can be saved as BMP, JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, WMV image files.

The Copy Text To Clipboard button copies text from all text elements in the window in a click; this too can be extremely useful especially if the program prevents text from being copied.

Want to resize a window quickly? That's what the Resize option is for. It has a sub-menu which lists several sizes (in terms of pixels), such as 640 x 480, 1024 x 768, 1280 x 1084, etc. There is a custom option which you can use to resize a window to a specific size you want to. I used this option to re-size multiple windows and combined this with the program's always on top option; excellent for keeping multiple program windows in view all the time.

The Alignment settings can be used for placing a window on the screen like, top-left, top-right, top-center or similarly at the bottom, or the middle of the screen.

Transparency changes the opacity of a window, and can be set from 0 to 100%. You can use the Priority option to change the process' priority level; this is handy when you want to run intensive applications and want to make sure they get the most out of the available resources, or when you want to tame a process so that it uses fewer resources.  You don't even have to run or switch to the Task Manager for this anymore if you use the program.

System Tray is probably the feature that I liked the most in the program, as you can use it to send literally any window to the system tray for quick access. I really wish Windows was able to do this by default but there is no such option unfortunately.

Closing Words

SmartSystemMenu does not need to be installed but can be set to auto start. Some of the options can be helpful in multi-monitor set-ups as well.

Unfortunately SmartSystemMenu does not work with programs which have their own system menu. I still found it useful when using MPV, Notepad, Wordpad, Total Commander, Paint, Foobar2000, Calibre and many other applications that don't use custom menus.

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