How to Add Context Menu Keyboard Shortcut in Windows 10

When you right-click using the mouse, the context menu opens. It works everywhere like desktop, browser and apps. Some keyboards have a special key to launch the context menu. For everyone else, you can now add a context menu keyboard shortcut to your Windows 10 computer.

We will use a free and open source keyboard button remapping tool. I’m talking about PowerToys. It was developed in-house by Microsoft and packs a lot of interesting features. One of them is the ability to assign a custom function by remapping it to any key.

Let’s start.

What are PowerToys?

PowerToys made its debut with Windows 95 and has always enjoyed being one of the backing character actors. A set of free utilities that give power users more control over lesser-known Windows features and how they work. Microsoft continued to tweak PowerToys by adding and removing features up until XP. We all know what a disaster Vista was and PowerToys didn’t get support for it either.

Things changed with the release of Windows 10, where Microsoft finally got a lot of things right. One of the decisions was to make PowerToys open source, which allowed independent developers to work on it. The code is available in the GitHub repository (link below) and comes with some new and old tools. One of them is the ability to easily remap keys. Some other notable features are:

• Color Picker: Click anywhere on an image/app to find the hexadecimal code for the color
• FancyZones: Split the desktop into zones to resize and organize open windows
• Image Editor: Quickly resize images instantly from context menu shortcut
• Keyboard Manager: Remap keyboard keys to new shortcuts
• PowerRename: Batch rename files using search and replace
• PowerToys Run: An advanced search bar shortcut that works anywhere
• Windows Key Shortcut Guide: View all keyboard shortcuts for Windows at a glance

You can see how powerful these tools are and they keep adding new ones. When it was first released, there were only 2-3 must-have features for all Windows users.

Download PowerToys

Remapping Keys to Add a Context Menu Button

If you haven’t already, you can download the PowerToys app from the link above.

Stage 1: Launch the app from the Start menu or notification area.

Step 2: Select the Keyboard Manager option in the left sidebar and turn on the Enable Keyboard Manager button. Click Remap a key to start the process.

Stage 3: Click the plus icon to add a new key. You can remap as many keys as you want.

Step 4: In the popup that follows, you will select the key you want to remap from the dropdown on the left, and select the one you want to remap on the right. For example, I am not using the scroll lock button. So I can remap it to the context menu with the Applications/Menu option. You can also use keyboard combinations such as Alt+A, but in the remap a shortcut field. Useful if you’re not sure which existing shortcut to remap. Just create a new shortcut.

Step 5: Click OK at the top to save the settings and you will be greeted with a notification. Click Continue Anyway.

You’re done and can test the newly remapped key or key combination to witness if the context menu pops up. This can be used on desktop, browser, etc. should work anywhere. It works just like a physical context menu key.

Fun Fact: The notification area to the right of the Taskbar, which houses the clock, Wi-Fi icon, and other app shortcuts, is not called the System Tray as users commonly think. It’s just a notification area inside the Taskbar.

How to Remove Remapped Key in PowerToys

You will follow the same steps as above to get to the Keyboard Manager area, which are steps 1 and 2. Have you noticed a delete icon next to each remapped hotkey? Click on it and confirm if prompted to delete it. The shortcut will no longer work and you can always recreate or recreate the same shortcut as needed.

Hidden Keyboard Shortcut for Context Menu

Here’s a bonus trick that may or may not work for you, depending on the keyboard layout and model you have. In my case it was working in Edge and Chrome apart from the desktop but for some reason it wasn’t working in Firefox. This means it doesn’t work in all apps either, but works in most places.

Press Shift+F10 or Ctrl+Shift+F10 on the keyboard to launch the context menu anywhere on your Windows 10 computer. It works in most areas, but I already have an external keyboard with a custom context menu icon. Try now.

menu of the day

PowerToys are incredibly powerful and come with many useful tools. The list only grows as developers continue to add more utilities to the app. The keyboard remapping tool is just one of them, and imagine what you can do with it alone.

There’s also the Remap shortcuts option, which we haven’t explored, but lets you tweak the keyboard shortcuts to your liking even more. I suggest playing with it for a while to see how it works. If you don’t like how it works, you can always delete them.

Next: Did you know that you can also remap Android hardware buttons to your liking? Click on the link below to find out how you can change the volume and power button functions right now.