Use Windows 8's quick access menu win+x

Starting with Windows 95, there is some form of "start" button on the taskbar of each version of Windows. In Windows 8, this was reshaped and the "Start" button disappeared. As shown in the following figure, the first icon on the left side of the taskbar you see in Win8 is a fixed application icon instead of the "Start" button.

Although there is no "start" button, we can open it on Win8 in a faster and more natural way. "Start" Screen:

1. For touch devices, Swipe your finger inward from the right side of the screen to trigger the charm bar and select the "Start" charm.

2. Move your mouse to the lower left corner of the screen and click the left mouse button.

I wonder if you noticed, after moving your mouse to the lower left corner of the screen, what happens when you click the right mouse button?

That's right, this is the pop-up shortcut menu that you get by right-clicking or pressing the Win+X key combination. Here we call it the Win+X menu, or the "Quick Access Menu". For those who are passionate about the traditional quick launch bar or the traditional start menu, it seems to be a place to take advantage of. But can it really be customized? After my test, for the default of these items, if you don't like it, you can delete it; but if you want to add shortcuts, it may be difficult.

As you can see in some places, in fact, the contents of this quick access menu are stored in a folder in the user profile. The path to this folder is %LocalAppData%\\Microsoft\\Windows\\WinX. Type this address through the Explorer, we can go to this folder:

Just open one of the folders, you can find that it is actually a shortcut~

So why are there three folders? How do they relate to the quick access menu?

In fact, a closer look reveals that there are two separate lines on the quick access menu. The two lines divide the menu into upper, middle, and lower areas, top to bottom, and inside each area. The shortcut collection corresponds to the three folders Group 3, Group 2 and Group 1 in the folder, just like this:

Then, for example, we want to put the desktop entry To delete, just go to the Group 1 folder and delete its shortcut. If you want to add a new group, you can rename a new folder to "Group4". These operations take effect after the resource manager process is restarted.

But where is the difficulty of customizing this menu? The difficulty is actually that the pre-existing shortcuts here are not ordinary shortcuts. These shortcuts are calculated as hashes, and hashes of these locations are checked by some modules at system startup. Only the shortcuts passed are available after login, and the custom ones are not able to show up because they are not checked. (At first we took a lot of detours, thinking that there is a direct relationship with some key values ​​of the registry, but it is not.) Since this is the case, then we theoretically have two ways to bypass this mechanism, one is to find these The calculated hash value is compared with the hash value of the hash value, that is, we can add the hash value of our custom shortcut to a possible hash value library; the second method is to close it. This hash value check function of the system allows all custom shortcuts to be mixed with pre-defined special shortcuts and displayed. For the first method, in fact, the system can use the HashData function to jointly calculate some information such as the address of the shortcut, and calculate a unique hash value. There is an Object in the system, and the metadata of the file can be saved. ? I think it is still possible. Will there be a compiled file to store these hashes? It is also possible. In short, the possibilities are varied and the space is limited. There is no further research here. For the second approach, we have seen that under system32 there is a system file dedicated to showing the new "start" screen and responsible for some of the Modern UI things, called "twinui.dll". It has been confirmed that part of its content controls whether Hash checksums are performed on these shortcuts when Windows 8 starts up. We can modify some of the contents of the Hex editor to turn off Hash verification. The specific method is not disclosed here. Moreover, tampering with system files may cause system instability, which has been not recommended. But for the purpose of learning and research, we found its existence and finally found some processes behind this mechanism. Currently, if you want to learn and research the Win+X quick access menu, just like you would apply a third-party custom theme to Windows 7, you have to modify the system files that manage this mechanism. It is recommended that you back up before you modify it, and you can use a small program called ""Win+X Menu Editor" that is widely circulated on the Internet to modify it. I think that Microsoft has made restrictions on this one, in order to prevent malware from using the unsafe operation without the user's knowledge. On the other hand, it hopes to protect the native Windows 8 product design and User experience, do not want this quick access menu to be the restoration of the Windows traditional start menu. what do you think? You are welcome to come up with ideas and discussions. Finally, if you want to understand the HashData function in the system mentioned above, then visit: htt p://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb759853(v=vs.85 ).aspx

If you are curious about how many shortcuts in the same Group folder are sorted, how can the name of the shortcut be different from the name displayed in the quick access menu? You can explore and explore it yourself. The tip is, don't forget the hidden desktop.ini file~