WinMac Menu

Windows application that shows a Windows context-like popup menu. It’s available in both Win32 and WinUI frameworks, adapts to your light/dark theme, allows to specify relative and absolute positioning, supports a dynamic Recent Items and Force Quit submenus, shell objects, folder submenus, power options menu, showing folder content in root menu, icons, sorting and many more!

Windows 11:

Windows 10:

Features

• Available in both Win32 and WinUI frameworks
• WinUI 3 menu renderer with configurable menu appearance
• Config-driven items with separators, folders as submenus, URIs, commands, power actions, and more
• Recent Items - dynamic submenu from %AppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent Items folder
• Recent Items grouping for folders and files
• Task Kill - dynamic submenu to forcibly end tasks
• This PC - dynamic submenu to list This PC content
• Home - dynamic submenu to show User Profile folder
• Light/Dark auto-adaptation - immersive dark hint on the invisible owner window
• Icons - per-item icons or glyphs, theme-aware overrides (light/dark), optional DefaultIcon + theme variants, and optional folder or files icon retrieval
• Placement controls (edges, center, or cursor, with offsets + ignore options), per‑monitor DPI aware
• Folder submenu behaviors: lazy population, max depth, name-only items, optional “Open ” entry
• Inline folder expansion (inject a folder’s contents directly into the root menu) with optional clickable header
• Sorting of folder content by name, date, size and type
• Granular extension hiding (global + recent-only override)
• Settings GUI available for those, who do not want to modify INI file directly
• Enable activation of WinMac Menu using various Start button and Windows key triggers
• Win + X activation trigger
• Large-menu highlight frame styles: background, border, or both
• Optional file-type icons instead of thumbnails in generated submenus
• Custom INI filenames displayed in the Settings window title
• ARM64 builds in addition to x64
• Configurable Hibernate power action
• DPI-aware root menu and submenu sizing
• Trigger folder or file context menu directly from submenus
• Discover the range of possible use cases.

Run

Quick Start: By default, it runs in background mode with a system tray icon.

Modes:

• Background Mode (default) - App stays running in background. Launch again to toggle/show menu.
• Single Run - Set RunInBackground=false in config to exit after menu closes (legacy behavior).
  • To start silently in background, without showing the menu on first launch, set ShowOnLaunch=false.

Custom config: Use --config <path> to point at a custom INI (single instance per INI path applies).

Sections

• [General] global behavior and style
• [Placement] position rules
• [Menu] menu items Item1..ItemN
• [Icons] per-item icon mapping Icon1..IconN and optional DefaultIcon/DefaultIconLight/DefaultIconDark
• [IconsLight] theme-specific per-item icons for light theme (Icon1..IconN)
• [IconsDark] theme-specific per-item icons for dark theme (Icon1..IconN)
• [Power] include or disable specific power actions
• [Sorting] sort folder content
• [Appearance] enable and configure different frameworks
• [Controls] enable pre-defined triggers
• [RecentItems] item settings
• [TaskKill] item settings
• [ThisPC] item settings
• [Home] item settings
• [Logging]

You can find more details about each section in Wiki page.

Security & Privacy

• No telemetry. The app does not collect personal data. Network access is only used when the user starts the update check.
• Registry usage: optional HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run entry when you enable “Start on login” from the tray. It’s off by default and only changed when you toggle it. There is no service or scheduled task.
• Keyboard/mouse hooks: installed only while the popup menu is visible to allow outside‑click/escape dismissal; they are immediately removed when the menu closes.
• Recent cleanup: choosing “Clear Recent Items list” deletes shortcut (.lnk) files from your user Recent folder. It doesn’t touch actual documents or programs. There’s no confirmation.
• Filesystem: reads your config.ini and enumerates folders you explicitly reference in the menu.

Notes

• WinMacMenu reads an INI. If missing, a default (config.ini) is created.
• Environment variables expand in labels, paths, params, and icon paths (e.g., %USERNAME%).
• Indices N in [Icons]/[IconsLight]/[IconsDark] map to ItemN in [Menu].
• Generated default INI contains no comments (to keep the file minimal). Comments are still supported by the parser if you add them manually: lines beginning with ; or # are ignored.
• The Win32 renderer is built with standard Win32 APIs: user32, shell32, shlwapi, comctl32, uxtheme, dwmapi, powrprof, advapi32.
• The Win32 renderer uses legacy popup menus. The optional WinUI renderer provides a more modern Windows-style menu appearance.
• The root menu can use up to 50% of the monitor work area, while submenus can use up to 33%.
• You can also pin shortcuts to taskbar, or add to custom toolbar. Each shortcut can refer to different config.ini files with different ini file names.
• INI file used in current session will be highlighted in tooptip of tray icon, if file name is different than default (config.ini).
• You can reference either *.dll or *.exe file in [Icons] section as path or just a file name (if the file resides in directory defined in %PATH%).