How To Remove Programs From Open With Menu In Windows 10

If you have installed enough number of programs on your PC, then we are sure that your “Open with” menu has some programs that you really don’t need. It’s because, every time you install a new program a shortcut of the program is added to the Open with menu.

While Windows shows only four or five programs when you right-click on a file and select Open with option, you get to see many installed programs with you Choose default program option. Users who prefer to see only important programs in Open with list might want to know how to clean-up the open with list.

Open with

For instance, in the below picture, programs such as Internet Explorer or uTorrent, VLC Media Player, VMware Player and Windows Live Movie Maker are appearing when I tried to choose a default program to open text (.txt) file. Considering that we don’t open a text file in Notepad, WordPad, Office or other text editing tools, Windows shouldn’t show programs that can’t handle text file type.

With default settings, Windows doesn’t let you choose which all programs to appear in the open with dialog. So one needs to either use Windows Registry or third-party programs to remove programs in the Open with list, we have a small tool that does the job with a click.

OpenWithView is a portable utility for Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10 operating systems to remove undesired programs from the list.

The program is very simple. Simply download and run the program to view list of programs that are present in Open with menu. Right-click on a program and select Disable Selected Items option to remove the particular program from the list.

Download OpenWithView

Delete program entries from Open with without using a third-party tool

As some of you know, one can also remove programs from Open with list by deleting entries without using third-party tools. Complete the below mentioned steps to remove programs from Open with dialog in Windows:

NOTE: It’s advisable to create a system restore point before editing Windows Registry.

Step 1: Type Regedit.exe in Start menu or taskbar search box and press enter key. Click Yes if you see the UAC dialog.

Step 2: In the Registry Editor, navigate to the following registry key:

(HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts).

Step 3: Right-click on the entries that you don’t want to see in Open with dialog and click delete. That’s it!