Why does the Shift+F10 menu differ from the right-click menu?
The Shift+F10 key is a keyboard shortcut for calling up the context menu on the selected item. but if you look closely, you might discover that the right-click menu and the Shift+F10 menu differ in subtle ways. Shouldn’t they be the same? After all, that’s the point of being a keyboard shortcut, right?
Let’s set aside the possibility that a program might be intentionally making them different, in violation of UI guidelines. For example, a poorly-designed program might use the WM_RBUTTONUP message as the trigger to display the context menu instead of using the WM_CONTEXTMENU message, in which case Shift+F10 won’t do anything at all. Or the poorly-designed program may specifically detect that the WM_CONTEXTMENU message was generated from the keyboard and choose to display a different menu. (This on top of the common error of forgetting to display a keyboard-invoked context menu at the currently selected item.) If somebody intentionally makes them different, then they’ll be different.
Okay, so the program is not intentionally creating a distinction between mouse-initiated and keyboard-initiated context menus. Shift+F10 and right-click both generate the WM_CONTEXTMENU message, and therefore the same menu-displaying code is invoked. The subtle difference is that when you press Shift+F10, the shift key is down, and as we all know, holding the shift key while calling up a context menu is a Windows convention for requesting the extended context menu rather than the normal context menu.
You get a different menu not because the program is going out of its way to show you a different menu, but because the use of the shift key accidentally triggers the extended behavior. It’s like why when you look at yourself in the mirror, your eyes are always open, or why when you call your own phone number, the line is always busy. To avoid this, use the Menu key (confusingly given the virtual key name VK_APPS) to call up the context menu. (This is the key that has a picture of a menu on it, usually to the right of your space bar.) When you press that key, the code which decides whether to show a normal or extended context menu will see that the shift key is not held down, and it’ll go for the normal context menu.
Of course, you can also press Shift+AppMenu, but then you’ll have come full circle.
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