Nilesoft Shell Pro

A context menu manager for Windows File Explorer: add, change or remove menu items with a plain-text configuration.

Documentation · Download · Issues · Original project · nilesoft.org

A community fork of Nilesoft Shell by Moudey and Nilesoft; not an official Nilesoft release.
It keeps the upstream configuration language and adds security and stability fixes,
a per-user mode that needs no administrator rights, and an app to set it up and configure it.

Download the latest release: setup-x64.msi · setup-arm64.msi · setup-x86.msi · portable zip (per user, no admin) · all releases. These links always point to the newest release.

What's different in Pro

The complete list of credits and acknowledgments can be found on the About This Fork page.

• Security. Registration no longer gives the Users group full control of the Windows 11 context-menu CLSID key (the TreatAs ACL), and no longer widens the access rights on the program folder. scripts/repair-treatas-acl.ps1 repairs machines where an earlier build already did; run it elevated, or with -WhatIfOnly to only report. Windows DLLs are no longer loaded through the DLL search path, and shell.dll and shell.exe are built with Control Flow Guard.
• Stability. COM is no longer initialised from DllMain, a configuration that imports itself can no longer crash Explorer, and fixes for COM reference counting, registry reads, Win32 path buffers, UTF-8 conversion and file copying. shell.exe exits with 0 on success and non-zero on failure.
• Menu fixes. Duplicate removal no longer overwrites the first item, leading separators are removed, Send to and New are read again when opened, and menus are placed correctly on monitors with negative coordinates. Shell no longer changes your selection-fade setting or Explorer's working directory, and the submenu delay is one visible line in shell.nss (showdelay = 200) that you can remove or turn off in the app.
• Per-user mode. shell -register -user registers for the current user under HKEY_CURRENT_USER without administrator rights, and the configuration can live in %APPDATA%\Nilesoft\Shell.
• Auto-reload. The configuration reloads when shell.nss or any file it imports changes. A configuration with an error is tried again once it has been saved again. No Explorer restart is needed after editing.
• Languages. All language files are installed, the language follows your Windows locale with a fallback to English, Norwegian (nb-NO, nn-NO) loads no.nss, Chinese for Hong Kong and Macao (zh-HK, zh-MO) loads zh-TW.nss and any other Chinese locale loads zh-CN.nss.
• Setup. Upgrading with the installer no longer deletes your shell.nss, and unregistering always removes the Windows 11 redirect.
• Default configuration. The default shell.nss adds the Develop, New file and System menus from Abdullah-Masood-05/nilesoft-shell-config (imports/develop.nss, imports/my-tools.nss). Items for programs that are not installed are hidden.
• The Nilesoft Shell Pro app. A desktop app for checking the installation, editing the configuration and restoring backups. See The app.

Screenshots

Appearance and the Themes gallery	Home
Open with	Context Menus
Behavior	Menu Builder
Config Editor	Backups

The menu itself, from upstream:

The screenshots of the app are made by src/settings/tools/screenshots.ps1, which renders the app's own window.

Install

Caution

If the original Nilesoft Shell is installed, uninstall it before installing Nilesoft Shell Pro. Pro has its own name and does not replace the original (installed with its own installer, winget, Scoop or Chocolatey, or a portable copy), so both stay registered with Explorer and collide: the context menu can stop appearing or show up twice. Uninstall it from Settings > Apps > Installed apps; for a portable copy run shell -unregister -restart from its folder and delete the folder. Back up your shell.nss and imports folder first if you want to keep your configuration. Updating from an earlier Nilesoft Shell Pro version is fine.

Each release has setup-x64.msi, setup-arm64.msi, setup-x86.msi, NilesoftShellPro-<version>-x64-portable.zip and SHA256SUMS.txt. The files are not code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen may warn before running them.

For all users (needs administrator rights once). Run the MSI for your platform. It installs to C:\Program Files\Nilesoft Shell, registers Shell with the Windows 11 classic menu, restarts Explorer and adds Nilesoft Shell Pro to the Start menu. It upgrades an earlier Nilesoft Shell Pro installation and keeps your shell.nss.

For the current user only (no administrator rights). Extract the portable zip to a folder you own, for example %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\NilesoftShellPro, and run NilesoftShellPro.exe: its first-run setup does the steps below. Or run them yourself from that folder:

shell -config:init
shell -register -user -treat -restart

-config:init copies shell.nss and imports to %APPDATA%\Nilesoft\Shell, where you can edit them. -treat turns on the classic context menu on Windows 11; leave it out on Windows 10. To remove it again: shell -unregister -user -restart.

The app. NilesoftShellPro.exe is a single file with no other dependencies (no VC++ runtime) and sits next to shell.exe; double-clicking shell.exe opens it too. Both the MSI and the portable zip include it (x64; ARM64 runs it under emulation; not included for x86, where the Start menu entry opens shell.exe).

Upstream Nilesoft Shell supports Windows 7 to 11. The app has only been run on Windows 11 so far.

The app

Nilesoft Shell Pro (NilesoftShellPro.exe) runs as the current user and needs no administrator rights. It works on the per-user configuration in %APPDATA%\Nilesoft\Shell and reads the installation state through shell -status.

Page	What it does
Home	Registration (none, user, machine or both), the Windows 11 menu state, the DLL and version in use, which shell.nss is loaded, recent errors from shell.log, and quick actions: register for me, restart Explorer, open the config folder.
Config Editor	A tree of shell.nss and its imports, a highlighted read view and an edit view. Edits are checked with shell -config:check before saving; saving keeps the file's encoding and line endings and takes a snapshot first.
Appearance	The example themes of the original project (Default, Shell 1.8, Acrylic, Gradient, Clear acrylic, Accent outline, Flat, and the 1.x Blue, Gray, Green and Yellow) as one-click cards, then theme, dark mode, density, background colour, opacity and effect, font, corner radius, border and shadow, with a live preview of the menu on your wallpaper. Each value shows which file sets it.
Behavior	Whether Shell's menu replaces the Windows 11 menu, the submenu delay, tooltips, screenshots, and what happens to Windows' own items (duplicates, disabled items, separators, icons).
Rules & Filters	Where the menu is shown: only in File Explorer and on the desktop, excluded programs and window classes, or a raw condition.
Context Menus	Turn the bundled menu modules (terminal, file manage, develop, go to, taskbar, my tools) on or off, and the rules that hide, move or rename Windows' own items.
Menu Builder	Add your own menus, items and separators with a title, icon, command and where they appear; saved to imports/settings-app-menus.nss.
Open with	"Open with" items for editors and terminals (VS Code, Zed, Cursor, JetBrains IDEs, Windows Terminal and more), found on this PC, plus apps you add; each an "Open in " item right under WinRAR or "Open in new window" (or grouped in a submenu), with a preview and a dry-run Test; other apps' own menu items (Git, VLC, 7-Zip...) can be hidden there too. Saved to imports/settings-app-openwith.nss.
Config Editor	A tree of shell.nss and its imports, a highlighted read view and an edit view. Edits are checked with shell -config:check before saving; saving keeps the file's encoding and line endings and takes a snapshot first.
Backups	Snapshots of the configuration, compared line by line with your files. Restore, pin, delete or create one by hand.
Preferences	The app's theme, updates, registration for all users (the one action that asks for administrator rights), and version and licence information.

Updates. The app checks this repository's GitHub releases once a day (Preferences, Check for updates automatically, on by default), downloads the MSI or portable zip that matches your install, verifies it against the release's SHA256SUMS.txt and installs it after you click Download and install (MSI installs show one administrator prompt). Details: Preferences & Updates.

Changes made on Appearance, Behavior and Rules & Filters are written to imports/settings-app.nss, imported last, so your own files stay as you wrote them. Every save is checked with shell -config:check first, and a configuration that Shell would reject is not written. Details: The app; each page has its own guide, for example Home, Config Editor and Backups.

The app is built with Slint 1.18 (C++), used under the Slint Royalty-free License 2.0. It also uses JSON for Modern C++ and Fluent UI System Icons, both MIT.

Command line

Run shell.exe from its folder. Options start with - or /; shell -? shows a summary. Without options, shell.exe opens the app (or, when NilesoftShellPro.exe isn't next to it, its own register and unregister window).

Option	What it does	Admin
-register (-r)	Register Shell for all users	Yes
-register -user	Register for the current user only	No
-unregister (-u)	Remove the registration; add -user for a per-user one	Without -user
-treat (-t)	With -register, use the classic context menu on Windows 11	As -register
-restart	Restart Explorer for the current session	No
-silent (-s)	Show no message boxes	No
-config:init / -config:reset	Create, or back up and recreate, the per-user configuration	No
-config:path	Print the configuration file in use	No
-config:check <file>	Parse a configuration and its imports, print the result as JSON	No
-status	Print the installation state as JSON	No
-out:<file>	Write -config:* and -status output to a file	No

Details and output formats: Command line.

Build from source

Core, installer. Needs Visual Studio 2022 or its Build Tools with the Desktop development with C++ workload. The installer project uses the WiX Toolset SDK 5, restored from NuGet. From the repository root in PowerShell:

$msbuild = "${env:ProgramFiles(x86)}\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\BuildTools\MSBuild\Current\Bin\MSBuild.exe"
& $msbuild src\Shell.sln -t:restore -p:RestorePackagesConfig=true -p:Configuration=Release -p:Platform=x64
& $msbuild src\Shell.sln -m -p:Configuration=Release -p:Platform=x64

With the full Visual Studio instead of Build Tools, change BuildTools in the path to Community, Professional or Enterprise. Output goes to src\bin.

The app. Needs CMake 3.25 or later, git and Rust stable for x86_64-pc-windows-msvc (via rustup). The release preset builds Slint 1.18.1 from source as a static library, so the first build takes a few minutes; later builds take seconds. Set SLINT_SOURCE_DIR to a local Slint checkout to avoid cloning it at configure time.

cd src\settings
cmake --preset x64-release
cmake --build --preset x64-release

This writes a self-contained NilesoftShellPro.exe to src\bin. Build the core first (for shell.exe); then rebuild the MSI with -t:setup:Rebuild to include NilesoftShellPro.exe. More, including a quicker dev build with the prebuilt Slint SDK: src/settings/README.md. To refresh the screenshots, run pwsh -File src\settings\tools\screenshots.ps1.

Docs site. Needs bun 1.4 or later. The pages are the HTML fragments in docs; see docs-site/README.md.

cd docs-site
bun install
bun run check   # build to dist/, then check every link
bun run serve   # http://127.0.0.1:4000/Shell/

Credits

• Nilesoft Shell by Moudey and Nilesoft: the program this fork is based on.
• Fixes ported from other forks, credited in each commit message: opj161/Shell (security, Control Flow Guard, path, COM, registry, encoding and DPI fixes, keeping shell.nss on upgrade), TCNOco/Shell (COM outside DllMain, bounded imports, duplicate removal, leaving Explorer's settings alone) and arvaidasre/Shell (removing the Windows 11 redirect on unregister, theme colour fallback, File::Copy, this.count).
• Upstream pull requests ported here: moudey#834 by MissinLinkk05551 (menus on monitors with negative coordinates), #836 by loliri (leading separators), #842 by jtabox (recovering from a broken configuration) and #846 by v4806 (Send to and New submenus).
• The default menus come from Abdullah-Masood-05/nilesoft-shell-config (MIT).

License

MIT, see LICENSE. Copyright (c) Nilesoft; the original copyright notice is kept. Third-party components keep their own licences.