It is only one extra click. It is also one extra click fifty times a day, with a small pause while the second menu loads, on a machine you use for real work. This page adds up the real cost, shows the built in shortcut most people never learn, and helps you decide whether the permanent classic menu is worth it for you.
Windows 11's right click menu is not broken — it is deliberately short. Microsoft kept the handful of actions it thinks are common and moved everything else behind the last line of the menu, Show more options. If your day is opening archives, scanning files, sending files to folders and opening things with specific programs, that design charges you on every single task. First, the honest count.
A technician or heavy user right clicks dozens of times a day. Each hidden action means: aim at the bottom of the short menu, click, wait while the second menu paints, aim again. Even at a second or two each, that is minutes a week — and worse, a broken rhythm. Ten years of Windows trained your hand to expect the item to simply be there, in the first menu, where it always was.
Look at what the short menu actually shows: mostly Windows' own actions. Now look at what gets demoted behind Show more options — the entries your programs added. 7-Zip and WinRAR, Git, your antivirus scan, Send to, Open with a specific app. The redesign hides your tools and keeps Microsoft's in front. That is why the annoyance lands hardest on people who actually use their PCs.
Before changing anything, learn the free trick: hold Shift while you right click, and Windows shows the full classic menu for that one click. Selecting a file and pressing Shift + F10 does the same job. If you need the full menu twice a week, stop here — no setting changed, nothing to maintain, nothing an update can take away.
The permanent restore earns its place when the hidden entries are your daily tools, when you reach for them many times a day, or when you support other people's PCs and need the menu to behave the same everywhere. That is exactly the audience the video's one click Classic Menu Switcher was built for: run it once and the extra click disappears entirely, for every right click, from then on.
Honesty cuts both ways. For touch screens the compact menu's wide spacing is genuinely easier to hit, new users find a short list less intimidating, and some people simply prefer the tidy look. This is a preference fix, not a repair — nothing is broken on your PC in either menu. Choose the one that fits your hands.
See the difference live in the video — the creator switches a real Windows 11 PC to the full classic menu in one click.
▶ Watch Full VideoYes. Hold Shift while you right click, or select the file and press Shift plus F10. Windows shows the complete classic menu for that one time and changes nothing permanently.
The stated goal was a cleaner, faster menu: the old one had grown long and messy as programs kept adding entries. The trade off is that everything beyond the basics now costs a second click.
You lose the compact layout and its icon row, and the menu gets longer. Every action the new menu offers still exists in the classic menu - nothing becomes unavailable.