How To Change Right-Click Option (Context) Menu Open Right In Windows 8.1

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Windows 8.1 is now available as a free upgrade if you are an existing Windows 8 user you can find the Windows 8.1 update in the Windows Store App. Windows 8.1 is overall a big patch to the previous Windows 8 release. It contains many fixes and improvements to address the issues based on the user feedback from the previous version – Windows 8.

One of the goal of Windows 8.1 is to make Windows 8 more user friendly. Because Windows 8 is designed for a touch based system, Microsoft has thought about change the default Right-Click Option or Context menu location, to open to the left side instead of right of the mouse cursors. I guess this change is welcome if you are a right hand user with a touch enabled devices. For the rest of the people, this might not be a confortable change, and we have a solution for it.

Here is How to Move The Right-Click Option Menu to the Right of our Mouse Cursor

Go to Start Menu > type ‘regedit’ and launch Regedit.exe

Navigate to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows

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You will find a key called “MenuDropAlignment” double click this key to update the value from 1 to 0. (Update: If you don’t see the key “MenuDropAlignment” or the key contains the value 0 that means, your version of Windows 8.1 doesn’t have the option menu launch to the left side behavior.)

Signout the computer or restart the machine (important, you must do this before seeing changes to take effect)

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Now you can go anywhere on your desktop and try to right-click again. Notice, the context menu is now open to the right of the mouse rather than left as the default Windows 8.1 setting.

I’ve also made your life easier if you don’t want to go through all the trouble to update a registry key value. You can simply download this tweak registry here and double click to apply the change.

There you have it, you can now get your old Windows right click menu back to where it always locates.

3 COMMENTS

  1. Maybe it’s a regional thing (U.S. here), maybe because my 8.1 is an upgrade from 8.0, or maybe because it’s not touch hardware, but I already get menus opening on the right side and always have. That Registry item doesn’t even exist on this system.

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