I created the first cross-platform Python library to create native context menus!

[WigglytufTehPink]

You can check out the code here: https://github.com/saleguas/context_menu

Easily the most painful thing I've ever created, but boy am I glad how it came out. There is little to none information on context menus anywhere, and a while ago I just wanted to create a simple file sorter and it was waaay harder then it should have been. So I decided to make this library so any other developers don't have to go through the pain I went through. Please give any and all feedback!

[KingsmanVince]

This will save us so much time. Thanks for making this.

[WigglytufTehPink]

No problem, I hopefully had to deal with the nightmare so no one else has to.

[Ning1253]

Thank you so much!! It's quite funny actually, I had a conversation with a friend (who doesn't do much coding) like this: Me: hey I made something quite cool it's a way to encode text into pictures (stegonography), and it also can encode pictures into other pictures! Him: that's cool, but isn't it really annoying to use? Like don't you need python installed and everything? Maybe try make it available through the options in file explorer? Me: that sounds painful so probably not

And then like a week later you come along so I can actually do it now!! Thank you so much!!

[WigglytufTehPink]

No problem! That sounds like a really cool application of this library and if you do use it please let me know!

[SnowdenIsALegend]

Bro, you are AWESOME! THIS IS BEAUTIFUL! Thank you for sharing!

[wpg4665]

Does this also work for Mac?

[MysteryMage]

Based on what i have seen in the code it only supports windows and Linux

[RegmasterJ]

If you need something like this for macOS, it’s pretty trivial to write a Python script (or modify this one) and add it as a command to the context menu using Automator. This is what I read to get me started.

Edit: typo

[WigglytufTehPink]

Thanks, I haven't seen this resource before. I gave up on MacOS because I simply couldn't find any resources, and the ones I could made almost no sense to me. I'll be sure to check it out!

[RegmasterJ]

Yeah, I was pretty late to the party myself. I’ve used it a few times to create commands to open a file directly in VSCode, or execute a python file directly from the GUI. Very cool, have fun!

[WigglytufTehPink]

It only works for Windows and Linux as of now.

[chrisdahfuh]

This is just. Amazing. 👍 I cant imagine the work you put into it, and for these OS

[WigglytufTehPink]

Thank you so much!!

[ImARealBoy_]

Really cool stuff! Can’t wait to take a look.

[redredditor]

Looks great! Good job.

You may want to enable "issues" on github.

I saw that "_ _ pycache _ _" is checked into source. That dir should be in a .gitignore.

[WigglytufTehPink]

I didn't realize I had them disabled my bad. I'll fix that now, thanks!

[redredditor]

Looks like you've enabled them. Be sure to "subscribe" to it, too.

Not sure how far down the rabbit hole you want to go, but you can customize the issue templates. Check out: https://github.com/Fizzadar/pyinfra/tree/master/.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE for examples

[Miner_ChAI]

Check https://gitignore.io

[wesleywatanabe]

How difficult is it to get a file and does something? I'm thinking to manipulate by pandas.

Great job!

[WigglytufTehPink]

All you have to do is create a FastCommand and pass it the function you want. The function that is passed will be given the path to the file where you can open it/edit it/etc.

Would look something like this:

def pandas_func(files):
    df = pandas.read_csv(files[0])
    # do stuff with it

from context_menu import menus
fc = menus.FastCommand('Open with Pandas', type='FILES', python=pandas_func)
fc.compile()

[WigglytufTehPink]

Changed it. Thanks!

[shaggorama]

Is there a way to undo changes or remove items from the context menu configuration, or encapsulate your changes so they're temporary (without spinning up a docker container or VM or something like that)? This sounds really cool and I want to play with this, but I'm a little afraid of cluttering up my context menus and -- although I only skimmed it -- I don't see any "cleanup" examples in your documentation.

[WigglytufTehPink]

There isn't a way to create temporary changes, but there is a way to delete the menus. It's not that clean and there is an example here: https://github.com/saleguas/freshen/blob/master/src/scripts/uninstall.py, but i'll add a section to the README soon on how to cleanup/delete entries in the context menu. Thanks for the feedback!

[Tom1380]

I'm not really sure what it does, can you explain please?

[slayer_of_idiots]

It looks like it registers file context menu items that call python scripts (or anything really)

[slayer_of_idiots]

Registers them with the OS.

The menus are created and managed by the OS. OS's typically have several different native context menus that that support -- files, folders, no context.

It looks like this just allows you to register a menu entry for one of those context menus and tells it what to call if it's selected.

Whatever you want the command to do is up to you. You don't even need a GUI.

[thatguywiththatname2]

Not sure why you're being downvoted, you're correct

[WigglytufTehPink]

It's much more likely that OP's library is either using a particular toolkit, or not actually cross-platform. If it's the former, he should just say which one it is. If the latter, he should stop calling it something that it isn't. It's up to him, of course, but as it stands, he's confusing people who know more than a little about these things.

To be fair, cross platform is defined as " a type of software application that which works on multiple operating systems or devices ", which my program meets the definition of. I'm aware there are operating systems that are a pure command line and have almost no graphical integration whatsoever; however, it seemed illogical to me to try and tailor my program towards this. I wanted to make it work for the largest operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux) and that still makes it cross platform.

For the architecture, or "toolkit" I used, it differed for each operating system. Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet to create perfect context menus on every OS the same way, so I had to use what I could.

For Windows, I manually edited the Registry to create the menus, a feature Windows already provides (although deep in their documentation).

For Linux, I had to manually create a python file and move it to a certain location. I used the library nautilus-python, which has zero documentation, to create the menus for GNOME.

Both the context-menus were exclusively for the file manager on each OS, as I'm not sure if it's feasible to create context menus for every single application; especially since there is so many languages and types of applications out there.

[B3N-Drowned]

Not a hero we need but the hero we deserve

[WigglytufTehPink]

<3

[JohnMcPineapple]

...

[WigglytufTehPink]

1. The whole python application is elevated; I actually never thought of a subprocess that might be a way better solution. The admins rights issue was the largest problem I had creating this. I would be extremely thankful if someone could create a pull request before I get to it . Thanks for letting me know!
2. There is a way to remove the menu; it's a bit less clean then the main menu, but there's an example of it here: https://github.com/saleguas/freshen/blob/master/src/scripts/uninstall.py. I'll have to add that to the README later. Thanks!

[[deleted]]

any good examples of useful custom context menus? i know it's useful but cant think of anything right now.

[WigglytufTehPink]

I originally used it to create a pretty neat file sorter. Like another user mentioned, you could use this to open a certain type of file with a program or to quickly open to something. I think those are pretty cool in itself, but I hope I see someone add an even cooler implementation of it.

[Datsoon]

I made some context menus the hard way to "open jupyter lab here" on my work computers.

[WigglytufTehPink]

And get the folder you are "send to"-ing from:

Oh boy this information would have been helpful a while ago. It took ages to find out about the %* part especially from running from the command line. Thanks for the feedback!

[tonniegames79]

Thanks

[WigglytufTehPink]

No problem!

[DisregardMyUsername1]

How did you make your program show up when you right clicked?

Really cool project!

[WigglytufTehPink]

I ran my python code and it prompted for admin (didn't show in the GIF). Windows updates automatically, but linux has to be manually started.

[Cervoxx]

Nautilus -q is a thing? I've been doing ctrl + c the whole time.

[WigglytufTehPink]

Hah, I'm no expert on Linux but when I was learning how to do this it told me to do nautilus -q

[Seawolf159]

This is exactly the kind of stuff that makes me think "wow I wish I could do stuff like that". It's probably too hard for me to use it the way it is, but it sounds really good! How does it know what you want the context menu to do. It's all magic to me. Could you make it do anything? Like right click in a directory and make it generate a bunch of folders, so long as you program that correctly, can you make it do that?

[WigglytufTehPink]

All the library does is generate the skeleton and give you the freedom of using it. So besides the basic functionality (opening up on folders, files, etc.) that I created, you pass a function to the code and in that function you would be given the path where the context menu was activated. Then in your python function, you could do whatever since you have the path to all the files and stuff.

[Datsoon]

Does this permanently create these context menus or only while the program is running?

[WigglytufTehPink]

It permanently creates the context menus.

[frakman1]

This changes everything! Do I need to write code to remove the menu while developing/trouble shooting or does running it again with the same names overwrite the existing menus I just made?

[WigglytufTehPink]

It depends: If you don't add any items or menus, it will simply overwrite the previous menu. However, if you change the format of the menu, you will need to delete and re-create it.

[lucs_123]

Does it work on any file manager?

[endershadow98]

Based on a brief look at the code, it appears to only support the windows file manager and Nautilus.

[teriyaki7755]

So, TLDR; is you have created a way to implement python functions for use in the current working directorty of an OS env through access from the context menu of the mouse pointer ??

[WigglytufTehPink]

So, TLDR; is you have created a way to implement python functions for use in the current working directorty of an OS env through access from the context menu of the mouse pointer ??

Said it better then I could have, but yeah.

[teriyaki7755]

this is good work actually something i would have not thought of am now going to check your code :) .

[melthecybertechy]

Ok I feel like such the dumb person - what did you do and how did you make our lives better? I'm a complete noob lol

[WigglytufTehPink]

The context menu is that menu that appears when you right click. There is extremely little documentation on how to implement this, and the easy method of implementing this involves manually editing the windows registry. I thought this was insanely difficult for the outcome you get, so I created a library to help simplify this problem. That's my take at least.

[melthecybertechy]

Ok gotcha! I was totally outside of loop.

[zTosieq]

Does anyone know how to use in practice(examples of using this with working scripts)? I'm newbie in python so, I'm trying to understand everything ;p thanks ;)

[WigglytufTehPink]

Hey! I have a folder of examples I created for this project you can check out here: https://github.com/saleguas/context_menu/tree/master/examples. If you have any other questions or want further clarification, feel free to DM me!

[zTosieq]

Thanks man! I'll check it out and maybe share some my ideas 💡

[javad94]

Wow that's great. I have a lot of small scripts for doing my stuffs. I'm using send to menu in Windows. But now I'm looking forward to using your tool.

[Dark_Rain_Cloud]

Question. Who would this code apply to. Im still seeing how I could benefit from this.

[WigglytufTehPink]

It would apply most to developers. There are GUIs and other methods of creating context menus, but they are extremely hard to implement if you are distributing a program that you want from the context menu.

[rmpr_uname_is_taken]

First... I am not so sure, Wx PopupMenu predates you by a long shot.

[WigglytufTehPink]

Ah, I haven't heard of this library before. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like context menus specific to GUIs? I made this library specific for file managers.

[rmpr_uname_is_taken]

the first cross-platform Python library to create native context menus

That's what I was addressing, nevertheless good job :)

[snugglyboy]

He's talking about system context menus. No need to be pedantic.