When you right-click on an empty space in an Explorer folder and select the New menu item, you always start with Folder and Shortcut, but the rest seems to be a jumbled list of file types.
I’ve always wondered about this, and now I know. I’m not entirely sure if I’m better off for it.
This feature caused all sorts of problems in Windows 10 build 1809, slow enumeration / opening, explorer would sometimes hang forcing a reload, it seems to have been resolved in build 1903.
I agree with the author, as a feature it could be far more useful if end users could prioritize certain entries. But to do that other behaviors would also have to change or become a bit smarter, like where it opens and the order of sorting relative to the position of the mouse event. I realize some nice 3rd party utilities exist to do customization, but it really should be a OS feature like being able to re-organise the Action Centre.
I found that feature mostly useless. Why would I want to have very few file types I use now and then (i.e. .txt) get lost in a list covering virtually every piece of software I installed on my computer? Why would I want to create access databases through right click menu? Or winamp playlists? Or empty winrar archives?
To me, New Menu Editor ( https://rbsoft.org/ ) is more useful than microsoft publisher which believes it merits a place in the new menu.
So today you learned that you can open the registry, make a few modifications like removing HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.pub\ShellNew so you don’t need a 3rd party tool like Right Click Enhancer. (New Menu Editor doesn’t exist. “Edit new menu” is a function of Right Click Enhancer)
The whole idea of the “New xxx” is that you are already in a folder in Explorer so you can quickly create a new file there. Of course you could just run that program, create a new file and enter the path when saving but being able to do that from Explorer is one of those nice-2-haves that can save you some time.
Sorting it alphabetically would only make sense if you sort it by what you SEE (and not by some key in the background). After all, sorting is supposed to help you quicker find what you are looking for.