menustack (week #21)

Tuesday, May 21, 2013 Labels: Application of the Week 2013 , Utility

A nifty dynamically loaded menu, one menu item per file, useful for docking onto your taskbar for easy access to lots of applications/shortcuts.

It also includes a search field at the top, so when the menu opens you can immediately start typing to filter out menu items.

It is simple to use.

Just create a shortcut (link) to the menustack.exe file. Then edit the shortcut properties, specifically the target. This is the default syntax:

menustack.exe --f filepattern filepath

The options are:

--f filepattern

Specifies the files to show in the menu. This is generally a wildcard, such as *.exe, *.lnk, *.sln, etc.

filepath

Specifies the directory to look for the files to include. This can be anywhere on your system. Be sure to include paths with spaces within double-quotes.

Here is an example:

"...\MenuStack.exe" --f *.lnk "%UserProfile%\Dropbox\Shortcuts"

This will create a menu item for each file (*.lnk) in the Shortcuts directory.

File system details:

The files in filepath are automatically sorted alphabetically. However, you can customize that also. You can basically separate the sort key from the displayed menu text (file name) using the `]` symbol. For instance, in the screen shot above, the menu items are not alphabetical. This is because the files (the .lnk files) are named as follows:

10] Chrome – Default.lnk
10] Chrome (Profile 2).lnk
10] Chrome (Profile 3).lnk
20] Beyond Compare.lnk
30] Sublime Text.lnk
30] Visual Studio 2013.lnk
50] Personal Projects.lnk
60] Putty.lnk
61] Winamp.lnk

It works pretty well. The search/filter is extremely inefficient and a bit wonky. But, it does the job!

Check out the source code at GitHub!