Windows 11 - How to remove 'Show more options'

Question

Like many, I've been struggling with the Windows 11 UI. It's taken away many of the things I actually liked about Windows, and introduced many of things from Apple's that I really dislike. I feel like it's somehow managed to become the worst-of-both-worlds, trying to be something that it's not, and doggedly pursuing usability so hard that it ironically makes itself unusable.

For me the biggest example of this is the fact that now when I right-click on anything, I now need to do an additional click to 'Show more options', which includes most of the options I'm typically using. The ones listed by default, in contrast, I do not use as much. This now means that for everything in Windows 10 that was 2 clicks, everything in Windows 11 is now 3. This is a step back in terms of productivity, and tbh feels pretty condescending "Oh what you wanted to a compress a folder? That's not a normal action... like opening Windows Terminal?.... that's something we've gone out of our way to hide and make more difficult for you to do."

I am just wondering if there is any way to, by default, have all options available right clicking, rather than now making this into a drill-down mechanic. I searched online and have not found any obvious way to do this.

Please note: None of the tags in this support ticket are relevant to the support ticket itself, as no relevant 'tags' from the predefined library appeared that were even close to the issues here. It feels like such a broken feature - requiring tags to be attached to support tickets, when the tags themselves are constrained, there's no way of knowing what they are unless you 'type 3 letters' only to discover 'Men', (menu), 'Opt' (options), 'Set' (settings) all say 'no results found'. After 10mins of trying to find and select relevant support tags I can't find anything . So classic that even the Microsoft support tool is itself broken and appears intentionally designed to turns users away by having mandatory fields that you can't get through. I feel like Microsoft here is trying to be like Apple, and the sad thing is, all its doing is ripping out options/settings/menus so that every screen is basically all negative space, and knowing how to do anything anymore requires a large research effort. I've found the usability of Windows has been steadily and consistently decreasing since the Windows 7 days.

Answer 1

That reg key has no effect anymore, it doesn't work. I have been playing with this for some time now.

Answer 2

Copy and paste the following command into Windows Terminal, then press Enter:

reg add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /f /ve