pyWinContext
pyWinContext is a manager for custom context menus, written in Python 3, supporting Windows 7 and higher. The application allows for complete control over what filetypes to provide commands to, the text and icons they show with and the tasks that get performed on the input files.
Table of Contents
Installation
For people just wanting to get the application up and running, there are pre-built releases available at the link below.
If you're installing from source, you will need to have the PyQt5 and Pillow packages (and PyInstaller if you wish to build an exe) available on your system. They can easily be installed using pip.
pip3 install pyqt5 pillow pyinstallerFrom there, you can run the application by launching launch.pyw as admin, or run the setup to create an exe (if you have installed PyInstaller).
pyinstaller --onefile uac_wrapper.specCommand Line Options
Configuration Location
If you wish to have pyWinContext store it's files in a specificied directory, instead of a folder in %appdata%, you can do so by passing -c or --config, and the location of the directory in the command line.
pyWinContext.exe -c "C:\Users\Example\pyWinContext"Tutorial
Basic Tutorial
When you first open up pyWinContext, you'll be presented with a window that looks like this.
First we start in the left pane of the window to setup our actions. By pressing the "New Action" button, you can add a new item to the list, with the name selected and editable.
The name acts as a unique identifier for the action. You can also edit the description by double clicking the description box. The contents of that box will be used as the text in the context menu.
As an example, we're going to make an action that will show details about a file in a window, such as name, filetype and file size. As such, I've named the action "filedetails", and gave it the description "List File Details".
Next, we move to the middle pane to select a filetype we'd like this action to show for. We can search for a specific filetype to make it easier to find. I'm going to apply our action to the ".txt" filetype, by searching ".txt" and ticking it's checkbox.
(Note: If a filetype you're looking for isn't shown, you can add it using the textbox at the bottom of this pane)
Then we move on to the right pane. Here we can set the name and description, just like the left pane, with the addition that we can also assign an icon if we want.
By opening up the command editor, we can actually start to define what our action does when we click on it.
Setting the editor to "Command List" allows us to write our basic script inside the application itself. By adding commands and writing a few lines, we get something like this.
Hitting OK, and then saving (either through the File > Save menu, or with the Ctrl + S shortcut) will allow us to test our action.
If you launched with File Export Mode, an Explorer window with two registry files will open. To install our action, we use the Setup.reg file.
If you launched with Direct Edit Mode, changes will have been applied in the background. All we need to do, is find .txt file, right click it, and see if our action shows up.
It worked! And we get to see what our script does when we execute it.
Anything that can be executed from a batch script will work with pyWinContext, so the possibilities for using command line applications and automation tools are endless.
These are just the basics. With groups added into the picture, you can start to build up nested menus and folders for all your actions, like in the preview picture at the top of the page, and help immensely with automation.
Variables
Variables and parameters are handled directly by the batch interpreter in Windows. You can find a helpful list of these here
License
This project is licensed under the GPLv3 License - see the LICENSE file for details.