Restoring Vista’s missing “Text Document” shortcut

Despite all the bad press it got, I’ve always liked Vista. I actually don’t think it was any great shakes. There are no huge benefits as far as I can tell. Being able to start an application by pressing the Windows key, typing the first few letters of the application’s name and pressing Enter is great if, like me, you like to keep your hands on the keyboard rather than using the mouse. Perversely, some might say, I like UAC, and over all Vista does look nicer that XP.

But one thing that’s always irked me is the fact that, for some reason, Microsoft decided to remove the Text Document option from the right-click > New option in Windows Explorer.

I quite often add little text documents here and there and I always found this shortcut in XP provided a handy way of doing this. You could just right-click > New > Text Document, then double-click the file that was created and edit the document in your default text editor.

Putting this shortcut back again involves editing your Windows Registry. Not for the feint-hearted. But fortunately, someone has done this for us and created a .reg file that you can just save and then double-click to add the settings (provided you have administrative privileges for your PC).

You can get this file here:

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/154554-new-context-menu-restore-default-menu-items.html

Scroll down the page to the heading To Restore Text Document and click the Download button.

Follow the instructions on the page. It says you need to restart your computer. In fact you can just end the Explorer process in Task Manager and start a new Explorer process and you’ll have the shortcut.