Solved Power Start Menu = (Activity from Author)

antspants · Apr 14, 2024

Karkre said:
I wonder if maybe it can affect the performance of the PC.

No.

Karkre said:
I've already tried Stardock Fences and others, but it didn't totally convince me.

*I get nothing from Stardock for telling people that it works for me, I don’t work for them.

Depends how you use Fences. I have Fences for different categories of programs (shortcuts)
e.x.
Most Used
System
Graphics Programs
Movie links
Images (on desktop
Etc etc

I also have a Fence that catches anything new that goes to my desktop that I call “Unsorted” which via settings, sends anything new that I save to my desktop, into until I can get around to moving the shortcut.

The way I have fences setup, I rarely have to use the Start Menu.
Also, I forget how because I don’t use it anymore or haven’t had time to do it since my fresh install, but when using Start11 & Fences at the same time, you can add a Fence to the Taskbar which converts it to a menu. So if a Fences has folders in it, the Fence will open like a menu on the Taskbar, then you can also expand the folder within the Fence like you would in a Start Menu.

It isn’t for everybody but these apps work for me.

pseymour · Apr 14, 2024

An easy way to find out would be to turn off desktop icons, and see if your life dramatically improves. If not, you do what you like.

Karkre · Apr 14, 2024

I don't remember exactly what I didn't like (maybe it was that I could only put the shortcuts in alphabetical order?).
Given your suggestions, I will try it again this week.

antspants · Apr 14, 2024

Karkre said:
I don't remember exactly what I didn't like (maybe it was that I could only put the shortcuts in alphabetical order?).
Given your suggestions, I will try it again this week.

You can sort them any way you like. Just like you can on the desktop.

If you get stuck with figuring something out, send me a PM if you like and I’ll help you best I can. Click on my username and “Start Conversation”
Or you could make a thread in this “Personalisation” section of the forum, which might benefit someone in the future.
I’d see the new thread pretty much the same day, or you could tag me.

(And they have a half decent support forum)

Karkre · Apr 14, 2024

antspants: Thanks for your help,

pseymour: I am new to Windows 11 (two months) and with a new PC.
My doubt was that if I continued adding things, the PC could suffer.

pseymour · Apr 14, 2024

Karkre said:
pseymour: I am new to Windows 11 (two months) and with a new PC.
My doubt was that if I continued adding things, the PC could suffer.

Right. I'm saying you can test it. Turn off the desktop icons you have, and see if performance improves. If you don't notice anything, then the number of icons are not affecting performance.

antspants · Apr 14, 2024

Karkre said:
antspants: Thanks for your help,

pseymour: I am new to Windows 11 (two months) and with a new PC.
My doubt was that if I continued adding things, the PC could suffer.

My wife has a new Lenovo Yoga laptop. It only took her a month to completely fill the desktop with shortcuts and files so I had to create her a folder/s also. But she likes it that way, God knows why.

My wife is a serial desktop abuser, I am considering calling some of her friends and holding an intervention.

There has been zero detrimental effects on performance with her Lenovo. Face it, half the time you can’t see your desktop and a shortcut is how large? 1KB?

antspants · Apr 14, 2024

In fact Fences would have more of an impact.

I believe you can add desktop folders to your Taskbar. I’ve never done it, let me look

antspants · Apr 14, 2024

Pin to Taskbar an App, Drive, File, Folder, or Site in Windows 11 Tutorial

This tutorial will show you how to pin an app, drive, file, folder, or site to the taskbar for your account in Windows 11. The taskbar in Windows 11 shows the Start menu, Search, Task View, Widgets, Chat, File Explorer, Microsoft Edge, and Microsoft Store buttons (icons) aligned to the center...

www.elevenforum.com

And I believe if you want to create an expandable shortcut menu, Edwin introduced me to QTTabBar

This is Edwins image:

hdmi · Apr 14, 2024

Wisewiz said:
But MS breaks EP with every update, and that's exactly what @Sqrly is trying to avoid with a mod of the Start menu. So far, in two years of using Power Start Menu, without Explorer Patcher, Start11, or StartAllBack, I've not had a hitch with PSM. I don't actually think he's abandoned it at all. He's just waiting for bug reports before he changes anything, and checking on Github tells me he's not receiving any lately. Not fixing what ain't broke is a good policy.

For me, it doesn't break with every update. The Win10 start menu of ExplorerPatcher doesn't rely on the symbols that it needs to download automatically from Microsoft each time after Windows Update moves Windows 11 to a new build. Instead, Valinet (the author of ExplorerPatcher) wrote that particular part of the code himself, which he did completely from scratch. This feature broke only one time, and took a while for him to fix it because he is a busy guy so, he also has a lot of other stuff to attend to. Admittedly, I don't use this feature. I use Open-Shell combined with SystemTrayMenu. (Alongside ExplorerPatcher, that is, but I don't use the start menu option of ExplorerPatcher for anything besides looking if it still works, and, it does.)

Even though I do use the Win7 style option for the start menu in Open-Shell, the reason why I use this option is NOT because it is "focused on Win7", but because it is focused on productivity always first. To be able to get an idea of why that is, you have to put in the effort and time it takes to fine tune the various many customization options that it has. It has quite a few actually, which IMO also helps to explain why so many people fail to see the true essence of what it is about (and always has been about, for that matter...). Probably one of the best kept secrets is that the optional search bar at the bottom of the Win7 style start menu of Open-Shell easily lets you find a whole plethora of things that belong to Windows that other, "equivalent" search features (also including Windows Search) do not. But there's more to Open-Shell than this. Lots and lots more.

On a side note, I also heavily depend on several other customizations that aren't necessarily always directly related to the start menu:

the ability to customize File Explorer (by setting ExplorerPatcher to Control Interface: Windows 10 Ribbon + setting Open-Shell to use various options that belong to the Classic Explorer component of Open-Shell),
the ability to bring back the Win10 taskbar (with ExplorerPatcher) and to apply a few customizations to the Win10 taskbar (with Open-Shell),
the simple window switcher (ExplorerPatcher feature),
various registry tweaks some of which can be found in Winaero Tweaker or in Ultimate Windows Tweaker or elsewhere on the internet e.g. on Tenforums/Elevenforum,
a bunch of scripts and some small programs I wrote myself mostly to automate certain stuff and that also involves free tools and utilities a lot,
...

A lot of these customizations are fixes to all sorts of problems that were created by Microsoft where previously there were no problems. When I say "problems", what I factually mean is that productivity suffers from them, and suffers from them severely. Even though I like to personalize some of the aesthetics as a small bonus, the problems that I am referring to here have got absolutely nothing to do with things like nostalgia or the classic-old "look and feel". It's productivity.

Kees · Apr 15, 2024

Karkre said:
I am trying to put all the applications (shortcuts) on the desktop... can this cause problems?

The problem I see with that is, that if you want to open an application, while it's shortcut is covered by the application(s) you're working on, you can't reach the shortcut without clicking away all windows covering the shortcut. I have that very often when working in some program and wishing to open another program.

With either a start menu (of any make) or with apps pinned on the taskbar you always can start another program without bothering where the shortcut on the desktop is situated and how to make it reachable for clicking!

antspants · Apr 15, 2024

Right clicking on the Taskbar / show desktop still works for me.

Kees · Apr 15, 2024

That is true, but when I am in a particular Firefox window (while other FF windows are opened), rightclick desktop/show desktop, doubleclick on some other shortcut on the desktop, the original FF window is not returning. So I have to search to open the right window again. Often I have many windows opened!

When I do that via taskbar pinned app, the window directly underneath the new window is the window I was focused on before.

Sounds a bit silly how I described it, but that's the language problem, can't find the right words to write what I have in mind in Dutch...

hdmi · Apr 15, 2024

Kees said:
That is true, but when I am in a particular Firefox window (while other FF windows are opened), rightclick desktop/show desktop, doubleclick on some other shortcut on the desktop, the original FF window is not returning. So I have to search to open the right window again.

No because pressing Alt+Tab only one time causes it to automatically switch back to the right window again. I have added the Show desktop shortcut from the Quick Launch folder to my toolbar that I have positioned between my Start button and the pinned area of my taskbar. This is the only icon I have on this specific toolbar, as all my other most frequently used shortcuts are on a separate toolbar that is positioned close to the middle of my taskbar (i.e., somewhere halfway between the pinned area and the notification icons area, or "system tray").

Due to the fact that the height of the Windows 10 taskbar can be made small and all the icons on it can be made equally small and the spacing between the icons is small (and the total amount of space that everything takes up in this manner is much smaller than the absolute minimum that is possible to have with the Windows 11 taskbar........), the Windows 10 taskbar with its option to add toolbars on it is vastly superior to pinning whatever. All my system tray icons are always visible on my taskbar because these are status indicators of course (and as a matter of fact so are several of the icons on my toolbar because, well... I run my own invisible scripts to make this whole thing possible, naturally and of course, but Microsoft wants to kill all my serious hard work in a future update because they just love watching people crawl while they continue to rake in all the money, also naturally and of course........).

Kees said:
Often I have many windows opened!

This is why I use the simple window switcher of ExplorerPatcher. It has an option to use Alt+key above Tab. When I press that special keyboard shortcut, any windows that do not belong to the same app as the current window are not shown in the simple window switcher's view. Through its settings, the simple window switcher of ExplorerPatcher also lets me do customizations that will affect the appearace of the preview thumbnails that it shows in the view, and that also affects how many previews can be shown in there. Remember what I said about productivity first.

Additionally, because

all my icons on my taskbar are small, and
all the spacings between all the icons on my taskbar are small, and
I don't pin anything to my taskbar excepting only File Explorer, and
the icons of open apps are set to Always combine,........

I get a real nice, clean, overview of what windows I have open.

Kees said:
When I do that via taskbar pinned app, the window directly underneath the new window is the window I was focused on before.

That's why I use the toolbars. The biggest difference between using the ability to pin apps and them is that the toolbars don't cause any unnecessary clutter between the icons of open apps. Setting the icons of open apps to Always combine is not a problem to me because hovering the mouse over these icons lets me easily see the previews to navigate between them.

Kees said:
Sounds a bit silly how I described it, but that's the language problem, can't find the right words to write what I have in mind in Dutch...

lol

Kees · Apr 15, 2024

The main toolbar I used via StartAllBack (and before that via ExplorerPatcher) was the Quick Launch toolbar. And that will become unusable in future.

That I did replace now by a trick to have some kind of quick launch, as I described here. But indeed, the distance between the icons on the tasbar (and in the system tray) is huge compared to those in Windows 10. But as I need only four main quick launch icons, it is not that bad. The other apps I can reach over the (classic) start menu of either OpenShell or Start11.

Now that I have switched over (again, did that already twice backwards and forwards) I dont want to go back directly, not before update to 24H2 and not before StartAllBack (or perhaps EP) gives the opportunity to make the taskbar small and colorized again.

Try3 · Apr 15, 2024

Kees said:
Quick Launch toolbar. And that will become unusable in future.

We do not know that.

Denis

Try3 · Apr 15, 2024

IgnorantOne said:
Do I understand correctly that the section outlined in red is going to go away?

View attachment 93528

I can't find any reference to that setting in this thread.

Perhaps you meant to post that in
www.elevenforum.com/t/microsoft-starts-stuffing-ads-in-the-windows-11-start-menu.24316

Denis

Elisyan · Apr 15, 2024

Sqrly said:
"Reccomendations" is just advertising in BS. I just want to remove that one section, the rest can just stay as-is.

If you want to remove that section, check TranslucentSM ( github link )

( I use Start11 menu, that's why this one looks empty )

antspants · Apr 15, 2024

Elisyan said:
If you want to remove that section, check TranslucentSM ( github link )

( I use Start11 menu, that's why this one looks empty )

View attachment 93535

I’m pretty sure you can make your menu translucent in Start11?
And yes, I don’t see anything I don’t want to see in Start11 either. It’s a great app.

Elisyan · Apr 15, 2024

antspants said:
I’m pretty sure you can make your menu translucent in Start11?
And yes, I don’t see anything I don’t want to see in Start11 either. It’s a great app.

This app changes the background of the windows start menu ( tweaks the start menu, not creating a new one )
Start11 uses a new start menu for itself ( I'm currently using )

i just recommended that so OP can remove that annoying section

This is Start11 menu: