Nilesoft Shell

Shell is a powerful, lightweight, and portable manager for the Windows File Explorer context menu. It allows you to:

• Customize Appearance: Fully control the look of your menus.
• Add Custom Items: Create new sub-menus, menu items, and separators.
• Modify/Remove Existing Items: Change or hide context menu items added by Windows or third-party software.
• Launch Applications/Resources: Access web pages, files, folders, and applications directly from the context menu.
• Support Various Objects: Works with files, folders, the desktop, and the taskbar.
• Advanced Features: Supports complex nested menus, multiple columns, search/filter, and expression syntax with built-in functions and predefined variables.
• Rich Visuals: Supports colors, glyphs, SVG, embedded icons, and image files (.ico, .png, .bmp).

To use Shell, download the latest version from the official website. Shell is designed to be portable and lightweight.

https://nilesoft.org/download

Nilesoft Shell is a lightweight extension for Windows File Explorer designed to provide high-level control over the context menu and improve performance.

Important Update Procedure: If you are updating to a newer version, you must first uninstall or unregister the previous version before proceeding with the update.

For detailed instructions on configuration, expression syntax, and advanced customization, browse the official online documentation.

https://nilesoft.org/docs

The development menu provides quick access to common editors. When an item is selected, it uses the current selection path (@sel.path) as an argument.

• Visual Studio Code: Executes code "@sel.path".
• Windows Notepad: Executes @sys.bin\notepad.exe "@sel.path".

Shell uses an import system to load localization, themes, and modular feature sets.

To handle localization, you can define a path variable and conditionally import the language file based on the system language (sys.lang). If a specific language file does not exist in the path, it defaults to en.nss.

Commonly imported modules include:

• imports/theme.nss for visual styling.
• imports/images.nss for asset management.
• imports/modify.nss for system modification capabilities.
• Feature-specific modules like terminal.nss, file-manage.nss, develop.nss, goto.nss, and taskbar.nss.

$loc_path='imports\lang\'
import lang loc_path + "en.nss"
import lang if(path.exists(loc_path + sys.lang + ".nss"),
               loc_path + sys.lang + ".nss",
               loc_path + "en.nss")

import 'imports/theme.nss'
import 'imports/images.nss'
import 'imports/modify.nss'

To add a menu to the taskbar that appears when no applications are active (or based on specific conditions), use a menu block with a where clause.

Example usage for a global settings/apps menu:

• Use where=@(this.count == 0) to target the taskbar when empty.
• Use expanded=true to have the menu open by default.
• Nest menu() blocks within the main block to create submenus (e.g., for 'Apps' or 'Windows' management).
• Use sep or sep=both to insert visual separators between items.
• Use command.<action> to invoke built-in shell commands like command.cascade_windows or command.toggle_desktop.

The settings block in shell.nss allows you to define global behavior for the Shell environment. Key configuration options include:

• priority: Sets the execution priority.
• exclude.where: A conditional expression to determine where settings should not apply (e.g., !process.is_explorer to exclude non-explorer processes).
• showdelay: The delay in milliseconds before showing elements.
• modify.remove.duplicate: Enables or disables the ability to remove duplicate system items when set to 1.
• tip.enabled: Toggles whether tooltips/tips are displayed.

settings
{
	priority=1
	exclude.where = !process.is_explorer
	showdelay = 200
	// Options to allow modification of system items
	modify.remove.duplicate=1
	tip.enabled=true
}