{"id":102581,"date":"2019-06-11T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-06-11T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=102581"},"modified":"2019-06-10T19:33:23","modified_gmt":"2019-06-11T02:33:23","slug":"20190611-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20190611-00\/?p=102581","title":{"rendered":"What order do the items in the “New” menu appear? It looks kind of random."},"content":{"rendered":"

When you right-click on an empty space in an Explorer folder and select the New<\/i> menu item, you always start with Folder<\/i> and Shortcut<\/i>, but the rest seems to be a jumbled list of file types.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Folder<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Shortcut<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u00a0<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u00a0<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u00a0<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Microsoft Access Database<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Bitmap image<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Contact<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Microsoft Word Document<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Microsoft Publisher Document<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Rich Text Document<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Text Document<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Microsoft Excel Worksheet<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Compressed (zipped) folder<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The list looks jumbled, but it’s a very specific kind of jumbled.<\/p>\n

The items in the New<\/i> menu are discovered by looking for Shell\u00adNew<\/code> subkeys<\/a> in HKEY_<\/code>CLASSES_<\/code>ROOT<\/code>. And a side effect of the way Explorer walks through the registry and collects the results is that they end up sorted alphabetically by file extension<\/i>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
 <\/td>\nFolder<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
 <\/td>\nShortcut<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u00a0<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u00a0<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u00a0<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
.accdb<\/td>\nMicrosoft Access Database<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
.bmp<\/td>\nBitmap image<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
.contact<\/td>\nContact<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
.docx<\/td>\nMicrosoft Word Document<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
.pptx<\/td>\nMicrosoft PowerPoint Presentation<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
.pub<\/td>\nMicrosoft Publisher Document<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
.rtf<\/td>\nRich Text Document<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
.txt<\/td>\nText Document<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
.xlsx<\/td>\nMicrosoft Excel Worksheet<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
.zip<\/td>\nCompressed (zipped) folder<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

This behavior is not contractual. It’s just an artifact of the implementation. Maybe it’ll change someday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s alphabetical order, but not in the obvious way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[104],"class_list":["post-102581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-tipssupport"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

It’s alphabetical order, but not in the obvious way.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102581\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}